[Report This]Date: March 12 2025 12:49 AM Title: Chapter 1
First question: why just you always curse us with stories that beg to be expanded upon, only to leave them as one-offs?!
You have a tightly focused narrative as usual here, exploring a very true-to-life exploration of an unbalanced friendship. Alice and Lucy feel believable enough as characters to sell this dynamic, and their roles feel realistic and layered in a way not often seen in shrink stories.
I honestly did not predict the reversal you did with Lucy not only maintaining but actually deepening her role as the dominant half of their pair with size. I fully anticipated this to go in the direction of role reversal but I'm glad it didn't. Also kinda cool to see the interaction of modern tech (Internet) with magic.
Overall, this was a terrific read and I look forward to seeing more of you in here!
Author's Response:
If the reader is left wanting more, that just means the writer did their job well! I think. If I'm being serious, I've thought about expanding this story, but it's something that would be very hard for me to get right. And also I'm lazy lol. So for the foreseeable future, what you see is what you get.
Any one of my characters being described as realistic and layered is a very big compliment, thank you. I did my best :)
I'm super happy that you didn't predict the reversal. While writing it I honestly wasn't sure whether anyone would fall for it or not, so I tried to make it good either way lol. But yeah, role reversal would go against the theme of the story, I feel.
I hope to write more in the future, so hopefully you'll see some of that soon enough. Thank you so much for the review!
[Report This]Date: December 15 2024 6:32 PM Title: Chapter 1
This was really good, and I'm glad it scored so high in the contest. I think the betrayal theme was used very effectively, both Alice's intended betrayal on Lucy and how the story winds up panning out. Alice's motivations where really interesting, such a flawed, jealous woman so down on herself she couldn't see the good thing she had in Lucy's friendship.
I like how its both characters' emotions that really drive the story, and not the threat of violence like one would normally expect from this kind of scenario. Neither character ever considers harming the other, but stealing the other's autonomy works as a looming threat throughout the story. I felt really bad for Alice at the end, even though she deserved what was coming to her, and I also sympathized with Lucy, who not only lost what seemed like a solid friendship but any potential of growing close with another rare magic user getting dashed as well. It's crushing in a way I don't often see in size stories. If this were an ongoing story, it would be really satisfying to see where these two go from here and see if their relationship could mend over time, but I understand as a contest entry this is likely a one and done.
Still, great story! Congrats on earning 2nd place with it. Given how many entries there were, that's really impressive!
Author's Response:
Wow, thank you! I really liked your entry as well. I normally have a strict preference for gentle, but I couldn't get that to work with the betrayal theme (although you did great in that regard with your entry). Still no violence here, but it's good to hear you found it crushing all the same.
Yeah, it ended pretty badly for both Lucy and Alice. I guess that's the thing with betrayals—you hurt both parties. I agree that there's potential for a continuation, but I'm not very good at writing anything longer than a chapter lol.