Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27708312-20170202163909/@comment-27708312-20170218155416

Guyscopelevel wrote:

Ralphini wrote: http://archiveofourown.org/works/9802166

Here's a short one I wrote today.

Um. Ok. To be fair, you warned me it was short. But I guess my expectations were unrealistically high after the quality of the first story.

I did like when Wendy's mom answers her daughter's question non-commitally, showing the reader where Wendy picked up the habit. But I was hoping (perhaps unrealistically) for a lot more.

It would have been interesting to see Young-Wendy display some personality trait that Present-Wendy has grown out of, possibly because of events in the story itself.

It would especially have been interesting to see some trait in Wendy's mom that Present-Wendy actively rebels against sharing.

I would have given ten million bonus points to have read Wendy's Mom utter the phrase "I gotta rethink my entire life.", thus implying that Present-Wendy was quoting her mom in "The Inconviencing" episode.

The story also displayed a painful number of errors in dealing with dynamite and high explosives. A little research would be helpful, unless you were trying to imply that Wendy's mom had no professional training in high explosives.

You can't just pile dynamite against something and expect it to be pulverized. If the force of the explosion is allowed to expand into open air, then most of the force is wasted. In Physics, an expanding force always seeks the least path of resistance. If you place a firecracker next to a brick, when it explodes a lot more air will be displaced than the lone brick. But if you place bricks in tight pile around the firecracker, the force of the expanding gas from the explosion *has* to shove the bricks aside to escape.

Um. Is this still a PG-13 review? Anyone who takes this advice to play with explosives is going to lose a limb. It takes a *lot* more knowhow to do this stuff safely.

Which is one reason why Wendy's mom's nonchalant attitude is so effective.

What is really likely to happen with the placement of dynamite as described in the story is that the one piece of dynamite placed in the hole in the tree is probably enough to blast a big enough gap in the trunk to bring the tree down. The rest of the sticks will either just blow the needeles off the tree, or fail to do anything at all.

Dynamite was invented over a hundred years ago by the founder of the Nobel Prize. It made him rich, but he was horrified to see his invention used to kill people in WWI. He used his great wealth to fund a Peace Prize and other prizes for the "advancement of mankind" in the hopes that the human race would soon grow out of the urge to use his invention to kill each other.

The reason that dynamite is still around and extremely popular, even though we have discovered fascinating new ways to slaughter each other, is that dynamite is the most stable high explosive known. A pile of dynamite set on fire will burn peacefully until ash. You can jump up and down on a stick of dynamite with no ill effects.

(Reader: do you recall my comment about loosing a limb? Just because dynamite is relatively safe for professionals to handle, doesn't mean it is safe! Everything I say about dynamite is true, but that doesn't mean it's foolproof. When I was a kid, I saw a label on a plastic bottle of chemicals that claimed the bottle was shatterproof. Young and very stupid, I took it as a challenge. Guess what? The bottle wasn't shatterproof; it certainty wasn't anywhere NEAR kidproof. Fortunately I was lucky; I didn't poison myself or loose sight in either eye. Kids, do yourself a favor and play it safe with your eyes, ears, and fingers until you are old enough to take chemistry in high school. That's when you learn about the really interesting ways to wreck stuff; and college chemistry is even a thousand times better than that!)

There are special detonation thingys you attach to a stick of dynamite to get it to explode. You'll excuse me if I decline to specify.

As unperturbable as Wendy's Mom is likely to be, I would hope that she would install detanators to her dynamite on the opposite side of the tree, out of Young-Wendy's sight. This is booth to ensure the tree doesn't kill her daughter when it comes down (think a moment which side of a tree do you want to vaporize? The side faceing you, or the opposite side? The side you pick is the general direction that the tree is going to fall) and also to prevent showing her daughter (and the reader) how it is done. This is not information kids should pick up from a Gravity Falls story. The show creator would be horrified.

A decent-sized tree like the ones seen in the woods surrounding the town of Gravity Falls, probably consist of ten to twenty tons of wood, each. It takes a lot of explosive material to reduce ten to twenty tons of ANYTHING to powder. Far more dynamite than a middle-aged woman can carry loose in her pockets. Even magic cartoon pockets that can carry any small, plot-critical items like we often see in GF.

You've got a great seed of a concept here, but it still needs work to lift it out of the first draft stage.

From a purely story telling perspective, the first few paragraphs just dump the mom's physcial description into the reader's lap like a police report. We get zero description of Young Wendy until her pigtails are mentioned at the end. I didn't even realize that Wendy was so young, even though you put the exact year in the first sentence, I just didn't bother to do the math. You need to show character-based evidence of the date to make it stick to the reader's memory. Otherwise they will just assume a time similar to the series. Dragging readers into the past can be tricky. A lot more work setting the scene and easing the reader into it is badly needed.

It can be tough feeding the reader necessary detail for the plot without making it dull as dishwater. Young-Wendy and her mom really need a much longer walk into with a bunch more interaction that coincidently involves a lot of physical description.

Once you have your reader sitting comfortably and aware of his environment and the actors on the stage, THEN you can launch into the plot.

Sorry if I didn't spend as much time or effort praising different elements. Be encouraged that I take the effort to critique that I do, not as an ego boost (being a bad critic is a lot of work to get people to hate you, there are ways that require far less effort and actually let you witness the expresions of shock and dismay). Rest assured, if I didn't think you had an encouraging level of writing talent, I would not waste much time saying so, in far fewer words than a review requires.

I think you can see in my reviews that being too harsh is something I avoid. While offering advice in an entertaining manner is my goal.

To misquote Soos:

"The crying makes it a little weird, but I guess I'm still reading."

Thanks again for the detailed review. I was intentionally implying that Wendy's mom was irresponsible with explosives, because I had the idea that she died in a demolition accident.

Any parts of the story you liked?