Talk:Portal/@comment-26054278-20150509002548

Well, this was a weird one. That category is certainly well-justified for this story. However, is this story great and a well-justified nomination? Not really, but it certainly isn't bad.

The plot is written in the second-person, which I give a lot of credit to the author for doing. I personally find it difficult to write like that, so when somebody does manage to pull it off (in a non-ritual pasta), I'm usually impressed. However, that doesn't stop this story from having a huge flaw in the usage of English throughout.

There are lots of awkward sentences and sentences that use grammar wrong, and I'll go through a few of them now to prove my point.

''All Summer, never have you felt a sort of warmth like this. This sensation wasn’t from the Sun beating down through your bedroom window all day.''

This sentence is grammatically incorrect due to the capitalization of "Summer" and "Sun". Summer is never capitalized unless it is the first word of a sentence, so the usage here is not right. Sun is only capitalized if listed with other planetary objects, which it isn't here. This is one problem that carries throughout the story, as the author also capitalizes "God" and "Hell" when neither word is supposed to be capitalized in the context they are used.

Probably not, as the oozing heat carried no smell, or any dtrace of color.

This one is pretty obvious.

After what appeared to your fear-warped perception of time to be an hour or so, you finally grasp the brass device to led to your momentary escape.

In this sentence, "led" needs to be changed to "lead" in order to keep the same tense. That brings up the various tense swaps of the story. The story is supposed to be written in the present-tense, but the author occasionally switches to the past tense when it shouldn't.

There are also a couple incomplete sentences and a couple that use the wrong word (one sentence uses "know" when it should be "now"). The only other English thing that really bothers me is that first sentence (which is awkward and I think is incomplete) and the constant usage of the word "though". The author puts "though" after a lot of sentences and it tends to get a bit annoying and too repetitive at times.

I could talk about every awkward sentence and error I noticed, but I do need to get to the plot someday. Anyway, the plot is good, but it does have a couple flaws. There will now be spoilers, by the way.

The plot is creative (and the hallway idea is clever and came out before P. T. did) and brings up some interesting ideas. There seems to be a bit of symbolism throughout the story for the emotional state of the main character, but since it didn't really do anything to my opinion, I won't analyze it here.

Anyway, the final paragraph is quite clever in the way it is written, as well as some of the descriptions of this person's life. I can certainly relate to a lot of the things the child thinks about (particularly the sections on friends and crushes) as I am very close in age to the character in the story. Therefore, I believe that the author captured the character of a 12-year old pretty well.

However, my problems come from the predictability and the lack of foreshadowing. The child only seems to know what happened closer to the end of the story, but any reader that didn't just skim the story would know exactly what happened with the parents shortly after the main character enters the portal when the author included the details about the photo and the word, "ADULTERESS". If the pasta was a lot more about this character dealing with the realization, then maybe it would be more justified in being predictable, but the story focuses more on the exact details of what happened, which, to be frank, aren't as interesting when you can predict exactly what went on. The only paragraph that really delivered that satisfaction was the final one.

When the story did deliver the twist with the child at the end, it forgot one of the crucial elements of twists: foreshadowing. While yes, it did foreshadow the child earlier, it needed to foreshadow the abortion element. In the state that it is, the abortion literally comes out of nowhere and seems as more of a way to get the reader to be scared as opposed to a clever element of the plot.

Speaking of scares, this story does have a share of kind of creepy moments. I'll give it benefit of the doubt (as I'm rarely scared of anything), but even the abortion baby moment is only just kind of disturbing to me as opposed to being really shocking/disturbing. Maybe it was included for shock value, but I kind of saw it as a bit cheap due to the lack of foreshadowing.

With that said, the story is still not bad, just not really great. The story is interesting to read, brings up new ideas, has an identifiable character (even though it is technically yourself), and has a fantastic final paragraph for an ending. The rest has a lot of problems, but overall, the good moments do make it at least above-average. 6/10.

Check out more of my critiques here: My Critiques