Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-33904527-20190210010145/@comment-33904527-20190210195702

Thanks for the feedback, but I think you may have misinterpreted some things. In terms or your criticism:

1: I'm not trying to push some sort of anti-government message here. Of course the overwhelming majority of conspiracies are completely wacko and extremely unlikely to be real, but the horror element in this story is from envisioning that they are real. You don't have to debunk them in the comments and point out their impossibility. That would be like watching Annabelle or Chucky and saying it was bad because there's no such thing as possessed dolls.

2: Daniel doesn't know he's hacked the website until he wakes up. He doesn't just realise and immediately fall asleep. Most of hacking consists of building programs to do the hacking for you, and running them on what you want to hack. This is what Daniel was doing. The idea is that he fell asleep through exhaustion while the program was running, and it hacked the website whilst he was asleep. I didn't think that it wasn't very obvious, but I'll try to make it clearer I guess?

3: Daniel isn't meant to be "The Chosen One". If he was supposedly destined to make the info public, he wouldn't be given a choice about it. If Daniel hadn't hacked the website, Eric would've persuaded the next person who they brought in. Daniel is expendable, just like anyone else.

4: You clearly have completely failed to see the whole point of why Daniel is there. He is being recruited by the government because of his hacking skills. This has happened to everyone before him, but it changes now because of Eric's decision to break the cycle. It's subverting the expectation that they would just kill Daniel so he doesn't spread all the confidential stuff. How is this not apparent in the text?

5: You say my characters have no emotion...but immediately afterwards call them empathetic? Of course they have emotion. Eric is tired of the cycle of recruitment and has pity for what Daniel might become, just like uncle Terry. Daniel cares about his family, but is too invested in his work to interact with them (he begs for them not be killed, even though he thinks they hate him). After Daniel leaks the info, he is horrified by the immediate reactions of those around him, causing him to commit suicide, showing he has remorse and regret for what he did. This is all evidence of them having emotions and feelings.

6: The cyanide pill (or more broadly, poisoning as a whole) is a common method of quick, effective suicide often seen as a stereotype for government operatives to use. I don't see why it can't be used in mass in the story. There is no "comfortable" method of suicide, unless you count euthanasia.

7: I don't exactly understand the point you're trying to make with Eric and Uncle Terry. They have to appear to the outside world, or else there would be investigations as to why they suddenly disappeared off the surface of the Earth after a SWAT raid.

8: What are you talking about? It clearly does faze him. He trashes the room with Eric and bursts into tears, ultimately choosing to commit suicide. That's pretty fazed if you ask me. More than fazed, broken, I'd say.

Honestly, I wouldn't consider a lot of your advice very valid, but thank you for bothering to suggest something, anyway.