Dragon Quill

[John had gotten a job at a metal working factory, a low building, newly built ]

This doesn’t seem to particularly follow. I mean, I’m guessing he wants to get a better idea of how his kingdom actually functions but he doesn’t need a set job for that and it seems like a new industry would be less useful for that than something that’s established as part of his kingdom (also, better to be in a job with a lot of interaction with others, right?)

[“You humans all think that just because a troll doesn’t like you,” he said, picking up an iron bar he’d been shaping, “it means he’s trying to, to, fuck you—”

“So to be clear, that’s a no?” John said, rubbing his hand through his newly bleached hair. It felt so odd being blond. Tavros hurled the bar as if it were a spear; John side-stepped and the thing embedded itself into a wooden support beam. Wooden beams in a metal-working factory. John would have to come down hard on this place when he was king. “It’s too bad,” John said, “I’m finding it kind of emotionally fulfilling to make you angry.”]

Ha!

But otherwise, not really seeing a point to this. It seems to just be dragging things out. You made a big deal of Jade’s awesome gun and how only now could she use it, and now you’re saying wait wait wait she can’t use it quite yet. So she’s got to sit around and learn a bit, and then she’ll be able to use it. There’s just no sense of tension there because you previously introduced the gun making it clear that it was totally strong enough and it’d work when it was needed. Meanwhile John’s own superpowers were enough to slaughter a guy and his guard without effort, but he’s just hanging out and not slaughtering the two other people in charge, because instead he’s got to teach other people to use the breeze for a bit so they can all slaughter the two people in charge together?

Basically, your characters are powerful enough this seems like delaying for its own sake, and it’s not a plot detour that’s particularly interesting anyway. It’s the tedious setup chapter usually stuck in a story because it isn’t yet plausible the main characters could win, so you need to build them up a bit, but you don’t actually need to do that.

If you want to delay, about the only thing that makes sense is for John to just be doing it because he doesn’t know if he’s ready to be king, in which case there shouldn’t be any sidetrack into forming training other people to fight with the breeze so the true king can take his throne. (Meanwhile, Jade shouldn’t have gotten her gun and declared war but be more concerned with finding him than the Dersites who don’t seem to be an imminent threat to the kingdom itself.) And if you want to do something lower powered where he actually needs help from people, then probably shouldn’t have effortlessly murdered that guy earlier, especially when it seems redundant given he was dying from plot disease.

(I’m assuming in the original he fights his way in with actual swords or whatever, which is a lot easier to have at the precise level of “can take one guy who has a guard, but not an entire castle”. John, in contrast, can just fly into the throne room or any other room he wants any time he wants, and also kill people at a distance and block arrows and so on.)

The angel bit is quite good, though.

[He was just kneeling their ]

There.

Also, I’m not clear why Karkat’s been magically healed by not Vriska. Did the girl do it with her life powers? Why?

[It was at this exact moment that Vriska realized what her main problem was as a person. She’d always been very intelligent, but not particularly clever, so for this she can be forgiven. She also possessed a hearty mixture of obscene pride and deep anger that made her do stupidly idiotic things such as challenging a sea-dweller, and an apparently magical one at that, while standing hip-deep in salt-water. ]

So truly Vriska.

[The seven perfect sisters twinkled in her left eye, a perfect match for the constellation. ]

I can see how this works, but you’re dealing with the troll line that fetishizes eight. Eight stars should be involved – if you want the eye connection, just have the constellation be seven in a ball and one off to the side and you’ve got their magic number.

Also, why Feferi and not Meenah? I realize when you’ve got someone who’s gone nuts you don’t need to much worry about their starting personality, but Meenah’s the actually stabby one, the one who more believably would think an evil pirate was clampletely oystersome!!!!!!!!!!!! and also the one who thinks Karkat’s cute.

[The light went into each of them and they burst out of their egg, crying and biting and gnashing their teeth, but it gave the larger part of itself to the one that would be given to a lusus, and made her so difficult and angry and violent that none of them would want her, not even that monstrous spider that would likely have just had her as a snack. That was hyperbole. ]

How was it hyperbole? Do you just mean the part about the spider having her as a snack? Because otherwise it seems like it’s exactly what happens, but the snack part doesn’t seem much like hyperbole because it’s just an either/or thing – either spiders do that kind of thing or they don’t, and no matter what it seems irrelevant to the whole point of them just not wanting her raised by a lusus so she doesn’t turn into Mindfang 2.0.

[She shook her box again. Feferi spasmed and fell instantly asleep. Her kin started peeling off in ugly grey-white flakes ]

Skin not kin, also this seems a rather rushed resolution – Mindfang had to do a lot to turn Feferi into an actual mermaid, so her dice being able to undo it seems hard to believe. It’s not like it’s necessary to resolve the situation without straight up murder, either. Feferi’s a sea troll. All they need to do is just get her out of this pit in particular and she could swim back home. Sucks a little she only gets to live in the ocean and can’t go on land, but she’d still have the whole ocean and other sea trolls to be with.

[The city had never been breached, and likely never would. Which is why they didn’t care that a complete second city had sprung up all around, a rainbow colored tent city inhabited by maniacs, who had purchased all the booze and pie in the outlier villages and threw random shit into the lake to watch it burn. Hell, it was good for business; at least they paid for things, unlike other encamped armies they’d experienced. One entrepreneurial crocodile had even started up a business of selling things that burned very prettily, and the visitors/invaders(?) put on nightly fireworks shows by competing to see who could skip lumps of magnesium and mineral salts across the lava farthest. Plus, their leader’d had a reservation at the hotel for months now; they couldn’t just turn the guy away, as long as the platinum kept right on coming. ]

Hm. On the one hand, it’s amusing, but I do wonder how much platinum they actually would have. You’ve described them as a pack of barely intelligent nutjobs – did they consistently steal platinum and currently the group’s drawing on the enormous stockpile they never got around to using before? When you mentioned them earlier they seemed more interested in slaves and specific trophies.

[Equius scrambled to his feet. “Silence, cur!” he boomed, the air warping a little. “You merely babbled so much that I couldn’t tell you what had happened. I exchanged my escorts for a treasure. They are currently residing with a subterranean society of batmen who worship them as goddesses.”

Ah, this gang. They are just gold. Or platinum, maybe.

John’s speech seems really random and rather full of political anachronisms. They’re a monarchy, they shouldn’t even have a concept of a dictator. Right now the closest should be “tyrant”, used in its original meaning as a someone who got the throne due to massing popular power rather than having the best bloodline, and I can’t even guess what they’d think of the rest of the message about not being enslaved and regimented when, well, that’s kind of their whole world at the moment. John may have a revelation that he should start a progressive movement, but he sure can’t be tapping into any such concept yet.

And hm.

The destruction of the angel city seems like it should be a nice capstone, but it’s rather underwhelming. I think it’s because you’ve just been throwing around so much power already. Karkat and Vriska weren’t previously able to take out the whole place in one go, but Karkat alone killed multiple angels and a tinfoil hat turned out to be enough to protect anyone from their death screams. I was left with the impression that the angels as a whole were quite killable, it would just take a while to get all of them. Plus Vriska’s dice already proved to be able to do anything at all when she fixed Feferi, and meanwhile John’s throwing around do-anything plot power (and that doesn’t seem even too necessary given it seems like they just need to wait a few more days and both Jack and the Dignitary will be dead of plague).

So, basically, there’s no sense to me the city needed to be destroyed because the angels are just really underwhelming as a cosmic threat and there isn’t that fun burst of yay now things have gotten serious where the destruction of this city would show Vriska was carrying back a weapon powerful enough to retake Prospit, since Prospit is fine several times over, and as I said fixing Feferi is actually more overpowered anyway.

(Actually, if the plague seemed less a judgment and more the main problem, the fixing Feferi thing could be spun as the important part, because John and Jade’s powers may be able to retake the city but without a cure they’ll just manage to be the ones ruling a necropolis. But then again Eridan’s already got some other cure thing anyway.)

[John’s speech, know that I lifted it from a Charlie Chaplain movie, The Great Dictator. ]

Oh. Yeah, not the best fit for a story with royalty.

Hm.

Dave, Equius and Eridan’s view of things

The actual battle stuff seems rather fillerish – it’s a lot of characters slaughtering even more minor characters, and every scene being one guy killing lots of guys is pretty predictable. Damara’s bit had the gruesomeness and crazy on its side, but it’s not particularly relevant to the plot even still. Riots and people fighting each other all over the place are chaos, but there’s no sign of what anyone’s aiming for.

Hm. If you’d skipped over the other scenes and there was a sense of what Damara being on the warpath meant, it could work – if it’s just John on his jackalope and his guys riding through in a show of power, and everyone letting them because I can’t see Derse having much support by now, then Damara is sent out by the Dignitary or something, then her slaughterfest would have meaning in that she’s the problem they need to deal with and her murdering establishes how big a threat she is, without any distractions by how everyone’s murdering everyone everywhere.

[“You said take us home,” Karkat said, “and we wind up in the middle of a street in the worst part of town. You need to admit to yourself that that isn’t normal.”]

[“Yeah, riots are great for looting!” Vriska said excitedly, pumping a fist. “Someone else does the breaking for you and you just need to do the entering.”]

These guys continue to be hilarious.

Well, that’s sure a creepy bit with Jack!

[“The Dignitary is a usurper! The real king has conquered the Capricorn clan like a good king should and brought them here to liberate your city from him!”

“Then why are they killing everybody?” Vriska snarled.

“Conquered doesn’t mean tamed!” Eridan snapped. “We’re working on getting them back under control.”

“What do you mean as a good king should?” John asked scowling.

“The king of Derse is and has always been a warrior,” Eridan said through clenched teeth as if he were tired of explaining some particularly boring bit of common sense. “Leading the charge and commanding the troops is the only thing our King can do.]

Yes excellent.

[John rolled the dice. They flashed blue and something fell to the ground in front of them with a hint of anticlimax. A neatly coiled rope.

Vriska squealed with glee. “YES! Oh God I missed you!” She picked up the rope and kissed it while John stared in confusion.]

I like how much she’s enjoyed her stolen rope. Plus it’s generally been part of the more entertaining bits of plot since the rope needs to be used in clever ways and can’t just win through sheer might.

And indeed then she goes on to do just that!

The resolution of Rose’s subplot is done well – I’d been wondering at her just disappearing when you’d set her up as in love with someone else and so not needing to be dead to not be a ship competitor. I’m not sure why Kanaya kills/turns Vriska, though – given she manages to hit Vriska so easily, it doesn’t seem it needed to be a deathblow to get her off Rose, and if it’s to do her the favor of making her a rainbow-drinker too, it’s somewhat out of the blue (Kanaya does seem interested in Vriska, given their chatting, but it doesn’t get beyond feeling her out). Plus it’s not like Vriska really needed another upgrade in power plotwise, unless you mean to say her dice aren’t going to work right anymore.

[All the same, the next few days were hard work, and bloody, trying and executing all of the traitors. Some were brazen about their crimes, others wept and pleaded. Terezi returned from who knew where and served as the prosecution. At the end of the day they ended up building a gibbet because there were too many. ]

Uh.

Given the massive death toll (especially with the rebellion turning free-for-all halfway through) and the fact that it’s rare for there to be huge numbers of people involved in a secret plot, this just makes it sound like they have an extraordinarily loose definition of “traitor”.

[They sneered at John, the worst of them, calling him a coward for shirking his duty, demanding that he crush their skulls with his hammer. ]

And this seems like it’s to try to force this whole thing to seem justified, a sort of look! They’re just terrible! thing. But I don’t see why it’d just be the particularly bad ones that object to John not following what’s apparently longstanding protocol in Prospit (and also, death by hanging, particularly death by hanging by people who don’t seem to hang criminals too much, is going to be a much worse death than a quick splatter by magic hammer.). In fact, if anything it seems like the less treasonous, the more upset they’d be that the guy killing them anyway isn’t even doing it the way he’s supposed to.

[Some were already calling him King John the Cold Hearted. He didn’t mind. He was going to fix Prospit, and they would remember him for that. ]

Eh, I think they have the right of it. He said earlier that that a lot of people had never seen him and that the royalty wasn’t doing much of a job of things, so it’s not like he was exactly owed their loyalty. Obviously there’s reason to be particularly harsh on treason in the sense you don’t want people to think they can just keep trying to kill you, but there’s also reason to recognize that the rank and file after a usurpation are probably not going to do anything on their own regardless of which side they nominally supported – and if there’s that many left to kill, he’s got to be wiping out an awful lot of people whose level of support was along the lines of continuing to do their job after the regime changed.

I guess it gets back to the fact this story is seesawing between the timeperiod the other story’s based in, where inequity and right of kings was a just a known fact, and more modern ideas of democracy and people having inherent rights. Under the old model, yeah, you just kill everyone who opposes you because you’re the boss and they aren’t. But if you’re a king with progressive ideals, it looks pretty bad, especially when that, not any of the pretty stuff you said, is your first act upon taking the office.

[He knew what it was and it wasn’t a plague, unless people can be plagues. The rash was the result of being bitten by a rainbow drinker. ]

Ah. So then, that’s why it seemed to be hitting particular people. But also getting into the general power issue, since you’ve just introduced yet another factor that should’ve been able to singlehandedly retake the city. All Kanaya had to do was murder the people on top rather than drawing it out like she did.

Also, not really clear what Sollux’s motivation in all this was.

[I Promise I Will Not Abuse This Link And You May Choose To Ignore Our Relationship At Anytime You Please. I Do Hope However, That You Will Pursue Me. A Good Kismesitude Is Difficult To Come By. ]

Huh. I didn’t get much sense of that last chapter, also, this seems way too considerate for a hateship and if the link can do anything and is only not being abused by Kanaya’s goodwill…that seems pretty dangerous for a hateship.

[“Vriska,” he whispered, “don’t worry, I’ve heard his sermons before; he’s starting to wind down,” John said.

“Really?” Vriska whispered excitedly.

John nodded. “We’re nearing the end of the second church era; he just needs to tell us about the third one and then he’ll finally start talking about wedding stuff, then comes the lecture on fidelity—”

Vriska jumped to her feet. “Oi! Preach!” she shouted, “We ain’t got your time! Move it along or Iiiiiiii’ll just do the ceremony!” The crowd murmured uncertainly to itself while John burst out laughing.

The uproar served to merely stir the bridal couple out of the stupor they’d been in for the past few hours. While at first they had been content to hold hands and look each other in the eyes, wondering how they had lived before this day, it was no longer as mind-blowing as it had been before noon.

The Patriarch sighed. “I hope you don’t take this as an abuse of my authority, Madame, as I understand that the auxilatrices played an important role in my ascendancy. In fact, my tetrapartite reprimand of your actions can and must be prefaced by the fact that I am fully cognizant of the following points; one: that I am a guest in this country and despite my superior rank it would be impolitic to offend the gentry and members of the clergy. These shall be referred to as the second and third estate from here on in not only for convenience’s sake but also so as to avoid triggering any possible adherents of the Beforan republican system, but I digress. The second point of which implications I am aware is the fact that the twin cities are considered quote-unquote ‘holy’ in church doctrine (and despite my obvious adherence as actual Patriarch of the church towards said doctrine I use the enclosure talons so as not to offend any member of the other Two Faiths who may not believe in the sanctity of the cities [and now I observe several members of the audience to be beast-men as well, so I shall alter my statement to include members of their religion along with whatever religion the trolls of the purple-blooded caste {‘Capricorn’ being considered oversimplification bordering on pejorative among scholars as only some purple-bloods are given the Capricorn mark} might follow, and in the admittedly unlikely event that a Cherub {Madame limeblood accompanying the Dersite prince, please stop giggling as I was being entirely serious} or Leprechaun is present in the audience, I will extend this courtesy to members of all possible religions] but I have deviated from my original point long enough; which is to say that the twin cities have historically been very metropolitan) and therefore that my presence here may be, and in fact has historically been, considered interference on the part of the Lopah into the affairs of—”]

Oh my god Kankri is perfectly terrible.

And yay, now everyone’s neatly paired up for a happy ending!

So hm.

I feel like this could have used more outlining and planning – I think you were relying on the movie’s structure but were trying to imitate more on a scene-by-scene level and not always paying attention to the point of the scene. A lot of the individual scenes were really good, they just didn’t flow very well at all – there kept being dramatic climax type scenes all over the place rather than steady rising action. The story’s also a lot stronger outside of Prospit – the story inside Prospit keeps taking two steps forward and one step back and drags a lot. (It also has a lot of your more summary writing – your scenes tend to be fun and snappy when there’s characters interacting with each other and, at the other extreme, really dull when it’s character vs crowd of nameless people.)

Also, I got the impression you really didn’t know what to do with the powers the characters had so you would throw out something setting-breaking then ignore it and have them struggling later. Just not making them so super in the first place would’ve been smoother. And there’s just too many overlapping superpowers that could’ve resolved this – I’d suggest cutting the whole plague business entirely, or maybe have Kanaya not draining the people on top after all, since if she can get to them, she could’ve killed all three ages ago instead of sucking dry lots of flunkies while she nibbled them.

Also, too many characters. You wrote most of the main characters really well, but things got worse as you moved away from that, and you really didn’t need to bloat your enormous cast further by spending so much time on John’s extra breath-students.

(And there’s the issue that while you mostly did a great job fitting the characters in while making them seem IC, you also jammed some characters into roles that just had a superficial connection. AR being evil for the most obvious – you’d have been better off just using more OCs for roles there.)

Plus, really bloody for something otherwise so lighthearted, which is especially at odds when you have the moments about caring about the common population and not just the couple important named characters.

But it was a pretty enjoyable ride overall. The various quest plots were all great, and the major characters always interesting and usually being really funny at that, and you lots of good turns of phrase throughout this.