Reviewer: SoylentGreen Signed
Date: March 05 2016
Title: Chapter 12: Chapter 11
It is surprising how hard it is to like the main characters even with a relativel interesting cast of minor and side characters. Laura and Janna bounce back and forth between levels of sadism without much warning or cause. Janna strts off as trying to be a good person does an unexplained 180 and becomes far more evil than the Laura, who simultaneously has become unexplicably smart and a forward thinker, establishing her own city. The main characters and ther descent into outright malice is quick and sudden with Laura and without a whole lot of reasoning behind it despite how the story enjoys to point out every so often that they are supposed to be students and scientists.
The world around them is interesting with a surprising amount of backstory and thought put into it for a size fic, but the min characters remain very unlikeable while many side characters who ever share the spotlight end up dead, especially if they act nice or reasonable. The setting is presented as cruel but the main characters, who are not from the main setting, quickly show themselves as far, far worse. They eventually find others like them and have a respect for Steve in particular though that is short lived and outight destroyed when the story falls victim (again) to a very common type of character. You know the ones that are too stupid to live. The distressed Valerie comes to mind, among a number of other annoying 'asshole characters who hate the main characters for no particular reason except that they are giant and continue to do so when it is very obvious these mino characters are doing the life-span lengthening equivalent of playing chicken with a freight train' we see so often.
Author's Response: Wow, thank you very much. This is the most useful review I recieved, ever.
What I wanted to convey is the fact that power corrupts. People who have power of others have almost always been cruel, the evidence ranges from social experiments over the men and women who guarded Germany's concentration camps right up to mother Theresa who let people die in horrifying agony for her personal gain. In my reading of history, good people are a dwindling minority and so it should not come as a surprise that two failed college brats turned out on the evil side even though they remain in constant conflict with the moral education they recieved from their parents, teachers and society at large.
This conflict is supposed to be a main element of this story.
I'm glad that you apreciate the side characters and (not to spoil too much) I am looking forward on building on them more heavily in the future. I had to come up with a few that I liked first, though, and the reason for the first few dying like flies (next to my binge reading of game of thrones) is the fact that I simply didn't like them very much.
