Talk:Venomous/@comment-Mikemacdee-20160715073440

I kept wondering if this contract killer's name was "Mary-Sue" during all this. Super skilled contract killer who never shuts up about how good he is at what he does. It's a drag having to endure this blowhard's narrative even for a story as short as this one.

The thing that really gets me, though, is his methodology. You're right as far as contract killers spending 90% of their job studying their targets, to the point where the kill is just an afterthought. But this guy takes it to an impossibly anal-retentive degree, as if God is his accomplice. If it weren't for ungodly luck, neither kills would have been remotely viable, let alone reliable, methods of execution. What if the snake was sleepy or otherwise didn't care about the jogging kid? What if the kid ran by the snake without incident, and without knowing it was even there? What if the other kid didn't need to take a piss today, and didn't stop at the log like he "always" does? It destroys suspension of disbelief when murder methods rely so much on pure chance. The killer can be sure these kids will most likely engage in X activities at Y time of day, but that's as far as the certainty goes, and any contract killer worth his/her salt would know that and plan contingencies or think of better alternatives. He could've put the spiders in victim 2's helmet at the house. He could've thrown the snake in the shower with victim 1. He could've poisoned either of them in their sleep, when they're alone and vulnerable.

Then it turns out the two victims were animal abusers in the most over-the-top sense, so they deserved to die. Well, fine, but wouldn't it be more appropriate to chain the two of them together and feed them to several badly starved dogs? You could've built the killer up as an animal abuser in the beginning, abusing some fighting dogs that haven't eaten in days; then the kidnapping of the boys by this lunatic, his intentions clear; then the big reveal that the kids are abusive psychos, and the killer is a vigilante of sorts before he unleashes the hounds on them. We still go from loathing what the narrator is doing to kind of rooting for it, but it's logical, thematic, and keeps the reader guessing (in theory, depends how it's handled). That's not the only way to handle this subject matter, but it makes a lot more sense.

What we get instead is a story with an obnoxious and uninteresting Mary-Sue killer and two cartoonishly evil kids who are murdered in cartoonishly convenient ways that don't even fit their crimes, given the narrator's zoological background and apparent love of animals. The concept isn't bad, but somewhere between conception and execution the whole thing just went boink.