Pairwise Chapter 1: By Your Side (PM (WQ))

This is cute, though I’m dubious of the decision to avoid quotation marks.

Blood Red (Karkat (Bec Noir))

It has been ever since they first met, when Jack had been stabbing him and Karkat couldn’t believe he’d finally found this other half of himself, even if said other half did have no horns and apparently no way of expressing his feelings without violence. Finding out about their shared blood colour was an added bonus.

That is a really weird interpretation of their relationship. There’s really nothing much about their pre-stabbing interaction that I’d expect Karkat to take this way, especially when it’s pretty short, and we know that sharing blood color was incredibly important to him.

It’s also just falling back on saying “just because”, since you’re just saying he did without explaining why Karkat thinks it’s the other half or anything.

Beyond that, this just doesn’t go anywhere much in terms of story. There’s a half-moment of hesitation on Jack’s part, but what that means for Jack isn’t explored, and Karkat doesn’t have any character arc either, he’s just alive at the start and dead at the end.

Spades Slick: Make Him Pay (SS, PS)

I was sort of thinking Slick is a bit more IC here than in Path’s usual verse – not so much that hyperviolent sadist is the proper way for him to be acting, just that it seems slightly more reasonable than the more friendly Sleuth obsessed one.

Then I noticed the part where the violent rape with Slick talking about how he was originally planning on murdering Sleuth afterward was meant as a prologue to all the later fic with them in a relationship.

Then I hit the line where Sleuth is thinking that the violent rape with Slick talking about how he was originally planning on murdering Sleuth afterward means Slick isn’t such a bad guy after all.

maybe Spades Slick isn’t entirely as irredeemable as he was led to believe.

What the hell.

Eyes Like Prospit (Jack (Karkat))

Kill You Again (Slick (Snowman))

I think what it comes down to is that there’s really very little sense of consideration for who the characters are. The degree of ICness and OOCness are just a matter of which plot it is. Sort of like the characters are all acting out plays picked from a bin.

Or put another way, if Rose is writing wizard fanfic, Path is writing noir fanfic. It’s probably best to just judge it from that standpoint.

Experimental Games & Worrying About the Circulation of Information (Dave, Eridan (Doc Scratch, Snowman, Slick, HB, CD, PM, WV, Bro, John))

So, I get you’re writing in a stream of consciousness style, but your paragraphs would be a lot more readable if they started and ended per topic, instead of your prose being arranged in relatively even chunks.

Don’t stare into the Alternian sun for too long.

I’m really not sure why you’re specifying Alternian here, since generally staring into the sun is bad and if anything, the only difference is that with the Alternian one, staring into it at all (or even being exposed to its light) is “too long”.

Clubs was- meh. The rest would be introduced and described at length later. You’ll love it. They’re all great, great fun. Boxcars is a blast. Literally.

…literally how? Clubs is the one with explosives. Boxcars is the safecracking-by-cracking-the-safe guy.

Mrs. Mendicant gave pretty good pointers. Granted, she was the guidance counselor… Oh well. Mr. Vagabond would probably scar you for life though, so avoid him. He was hard to understand half of them time, anyway. 

That…seems kind of random. PM is more someone who does than someone who advises, and WV’s the one who inspired a whole uprising so I think he’d at least be able to enunciate decently.

Also, you mean “of the time” not “of them time”.

…so, first you say the student body is extremely diverse, then that it’s three-fourths trolls (which shouldn’t be capitalized, by the way). Are you counting blood differences as part of that diversity?

There was never a moment where he did not have the complete poster expression of indifference, and his tongue was almost as sharp as the Lalonde girl’s. [Oh, I do hope it’s not much of an inconvenience, but I’ll be giving briefs on people depending on their importance at that direct moment. Some guys won’t get introduced for a long while. It makes stuff flow better, you know?]

That “Oh” is like a branch dropped across the track. Your narration is talking fast and often skipping necessary words, then suddenly we screech to a halt and change tones for the parenthetical, which for some reason is in brackets. Starting further in, like “Hope it’s not…” would be an improvement.

The fellow chatting with the short-haired, paler troll was Eridan. 

Also, you’re moving between tenses. When you introduced Dave, you said “is”. It’s also an awkward description because you haven’t mentioned any short-haired pale troll, and you don’t have any cue that it’s supposed to be a matter of the narrator pretending to point someone out, like, for example, “See that fellow chatting with…” or something.

Another thing that will always go down in the notoriety of high school is the parties. Those things could get downright nasty. This school was no exception to that. No, there was no underage drinking or stuff like that.

Oh come on, seriously? Of all the parties everyone in the entire high school goes to, none of them at all ever involved alcohol, which can be found in most kids’ own homes?

…and for some reason March Eridan who Dave for some reason doesn’t realize anything odd about even though it’s a school party and he’s never seen any girl like that. I guess it does seem like Eridan was deliberately pretending not to be Eridan, which is a point in its plausibility, but it’s still hovering in the negatives.

Also, the swearing-isn’t-ladylike thing makes no sense because you haven’t said anything about Dave being in drag.

This is amusing, but it really needs more polish. The narration is mostly just getting in the way.

PM (WQ)
Karkat (Bec Noir)
SS, PS
Jack (Karkat)
Slick (Snowman)
Dave, Eridan (Doc Scratch, Snowman, Slick, HB, CD, PM, WV, Bro, John)

One of five.