Reviewer: Jim1989 Signed
Date: August 12 2015
Title: Chapter 13: Inundation
And the suspension continues! I'm glad to see that there is at least one sympathetic soul in the group, maybe two if you consider Hannah (overly playful but not sadistic). Wondering how long poor Jack is going to be held prisoner. Eventually someone is going to be concerned (family or the few friends he has in this world) and file a missing persons report or something. Really like the variety you have going on in the group: the power-hungry leader (Caitlin), the sadist (Amber), the semi-ditzy party girl (Hannah), and the compassionate voice of reason (Alex).
Side note on Caitlin: Was that night she threw the tantrum and then broke down emotionally just a one-time deal? I couldn't tell if she had some kind of potential love-hate relationship for Jack or slight tsundere characteristics towards him, or if that all was just a momentary break from her overall character of the domineering type she comes off as in general. Wondering how she'll come off from here on out.
Tantalizing stuff overall, both among the variuos Alphas and the direction of the story in general. Looking forward to more!
Author's Response: Thank you for the in-depth review, it's really nice to read other peoples' analyses of what's going on, and for the most part your experiences of reading this story have matched my intentions when writing it.
It's deliberately not clear how or why Caitlin has selected Jack to be subjected to this kind of treatment, she has previous with at least one Beta boy that was presumably serious, and she has explained some of her reasoning - a lot of what you have mentioned may turn out to be true, it's quite complex and will ultimately reveal itself down the line. I wasn't familiar with tsundere as a concept but thank you for drawing my attention to it; now I know what it is I've definitely seen it used prominently in manga I've read, and there are elements of GH-X2 that could be considered very similar.
PS: Whilst Alex comes across in this chapter as the 'compassionate voice of reason', it's more a by-product of seeing the worst side of Caitlin and Amber, one that she may not have seen before. She's not a Beta-friendly person, by-and-large, and didn't seem to have a problem crushing his pen, or carrying him for Caitlin to antagonise behind closed doors, but when confronted with reality of a small, powerless boy being held captive, stripped and abused in the name of 'fun' for her Alpha buddies, she felt uncomfortable being complicit with it. This chapter was quite an eye-opening one for her, as in many ways this was the first time she's been made aware of how serious the implications of being a helpless Beta can be, and the guilt and confusion was too much to take.