Talk:To the Moon/@comment-26054278-20160314212230

I’m very conflicted on how to feel about this story. On one hand, it does do some aspects well. However, on the other hand, structural problems prevent this story from being of true quality.

The part before the “After Three Weeks” section is handled quite effectively, honestly. This introduction sets up the basic ideas behind our characters and offers a lengthy overview on what the story could possibly be about. Sure, the characters of Steel and Walters seem rather stereotypical and don’t have too much of a purpose (at least, at the end), but Frank is certainly interesting enough for the reader to want to follow his journey as he goes to the moon.

Also, the writing itself is quite competent. There is varied usage of language with nothing too repetitive, but there definitely isn’t many segments of prose that stand out. It is generally very even; it would have been nice to have some actual detailed sections describing more physical features of the moon or in the ship Frank is in, but as is, there isn’t exactly anything wrong with the technical writing.

The premise is a minor point of confliction for me, but I do feel there are some things to address. The plot involves Frank, a criminal, deciding to spend his sentence working on the moon, building houses and creating an atmosphere with trained scientists.

Unfortunately, the idea of sending convicts to the moon to work, let alone on a complex atmosphere, is one that I find incredibly hard to believe. I can believe that maybe they will be doing work such as building houses or other forms of manual labor on the moon. However, you’ve assigned possibly dangerous criminals with a history of disobeying the laws of society to, apparently, in addition to building houses, also work on an atmosphere that will maintain human life. Not only that, but many of these convicts aren’t even trained in scientific fields, so they really don’t have much of a point in helping to develop such an important atmosphere. Trusting convicts to build an atmosphere that could easily end up killing everyone if one tiny little thing goes wrong seems like a rather large gap in logic to me.

For a story centered on criminals getting to the moon, this explanation just doesn’t seem logical. If you got rid of the part about these criminals helping to build a whole atmosphere, I think that it would actually be more believable. It is a small part of the overarching story, but I think justifying why Frank is on the moon is still vital.

That rant went a little off the rails, but I’ve still been avoiding my biggest issue with the Creepypasta: the ending.

The conclusion of this story is incredibly odd, and not in a good way. For, instead of delving into Frank’s life on the moon, it instead cuts to Officer Steel and Officer Walters returning the moon after three weeks. This would be a fine choice to make in terms of the plot… had we not just spent a large portion of the story detailing how Frank would survive on the moon, what he would be doing there, and who the other people on the moon-base were.

This ending renders almost all of what was established in the first part pointless. Thomas Stone, the scientist whom Frank meets at the end of the first section, never appears again. His appearance in the story ends up adding nothing. Besides the fact that there was a weird “spore” discovered and the fact that Frank is on the moon, most of what is brought up so well in the first “chapter” is simply ignored. For a Creepypasta with such potential, it is a shame to see the story throw away the strong start for such a weak, and frankly rushed, conclusion.

There is also some general confusion with the foreshadowing of what exactly is on the moon. When Walters tells the story, he describes one of the witnesses as having seen an actual monster. However, when Frank shares his experiences of what happened over the past three weeks Walter and Steel were gone, he only speaks of the spore that were found, and how those ended up slowly killing everyone.

Is there a monster? I have no idea. Since it wasn’t mentioned or brought up again, I can assume that there is no monster, and that the witness who claimed that he/she saw a monster was just insane. In that case, why was this segment included in the story?

However, if there is a monster, then why was it never put back into play? The author foreshadowed this tentacle-like beast by sharing what this witness saw, and not delivering on that or building upon that idea just makes this small section, like many other elements of the introduction, pointless. It makes it seem like the author wanted to make a monster story, only to change their mind later on and forget to fix/cut out the areas that referenced the monster.

Did the long introduction subvert my expectations? Yes, it certainly did. However, what the story delivered instead as the ending only disappointed me. You can foreshadow cleverly and deliver on expectations while still having a twist and shocking the reader. Subversion of an expectations is not an excuse for poor pacing.

While I will not necessarily call this a horrible story, I think there are some serious structural problems that prevent it from being anything more than mediocre. If there was more that stood out or anything particularly interesting, I may have made it somewhere in the 5 to 6 range, but considering the lack of any element that was done truly fantastically, I’ll have to settle for something below average. 4.5/10.

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