Talk:ALF Autopsy/@comment-25234449-20140724210846

Okay, I gotta say as my first serious comment on a pasta, the first half of this is so excellent, but the second half falls so far. Let me throw down some constructive criticism, here...

Chapters I and II are written extremely well, and to a degree, so is Chapter III. You (the author) do an excellent job in creating the seedy underworld of Osaka's less-than-savory back alleys and Japan's hyper-techno industrial environment. The way the narrator comes across the LaserDisc is a little melodramatic but that's fine, it's a story. But here's where it falls flat: The beginning of Chapter III-- this could have been the best 'lost episode'/'TV' pasta ever, but in Chapter III it falls back into "Squidward's Suicide" territory with the protagonist becoming sickened by what he sees, vomiting all over the place and even being emailed the video in digital form, suggesting some sort of haunting aspect to it. The first two chapters thought outside the box so well, but then as soon as the third chapter started you just jumped deep back in the box.

Suggestion: Instead of being haunted by the ALF autopsy video, becoming sickened, haunted and praying for the nightmare of watching it to go away, instead of responding with fear, why not have the protagonist respond with curiousity? Sure, he could still be leery of the video's origins, but you had a golden oppurtunity to have the narrator go deeper into this vividly constructed world you'd been crafting, to find more questions, not to needlessly write exposition and answer everything but find an increasingly scary number of scary people and things behind the autopsy video more questions being raised than answers being found. That's really where I thought it was about to go.

When you wrote about the human arm up inside ALF as he's being dissected, I thought that was absolutely brilliant, a kind of "if we control the puppets, who is our puppetmaster" kind of question. But I was so sorely disappointed by the third chapter and how it fell into the same cliches that befall so many lost episode/TV pastas. Other than the third chapter, the pasta truly flawless.

6/10 as a whole, 10/10 for the first two chapters.