[C&C] Belle

[Belle Hibiki]

Belle:

Another well thought out, engaging character. I haven't read much of your work in the past, and I can see why you're regarded as one of the better writers on this site.

Belle, if nothing else, is selfless. He picks up any poor, abused soul's problem and makes it his own until it's fixed. If I remember correctly, isn't Belle trying to get the dragonballs to revive everyone that died during the reign of The Construct? And he almost flipped out when Blaze eluded that the occupants of the overturned museum truck, now missing, were killed by him. Belle couldn't possibly have any personal connection with those random security officers, and yet their untimely demises was enough to enrage Belle to the point of lashing out. That's compassion right there.

It's also interesting to see that his love for all people even extends to the murderer. After the rollercoaster of emotions he endured while fighting Blaze, and full well knowing how dangerous he was unchecked, Belle didn't kill him. It's truly all encompassing and for a half saiyan martial artist who was physically abused by his father to show mercy like that is surreal. It's almost surreal to the point of unrealistic, but Belle's outward manifestations of these traits cement the believability. In a sense, I see a similarity with Orion.

He's also quirky. His fear of girls (although it hasn't featured in Shadow Play to any noticeable degree yet), his ineptitude with literacy and technology in a computer powered galaxy add plenty of extra chances for a good chuckle.

You have a diverse vocabulary. Words like "suffused" and "corona", although I didn't know their meaning beforehand, present a vibrant description of events and aesthetics. You blend these words masterfully into such descriptive phrases as "wine red eyes" and "silky shiver of rain." Tantilising imagery such as that make it hard to stop reading, if only to find out how you'll reference Belle's next minutes.

Not sure if you collaborated with Kaden about how you defeated Blaze, but I really enjoyed it. I didn't see it coming at all and I love being surprised.

Downsides? Not a lot, really. Your grammar is almost always spot on, but sometimes you overuse words. Several times you inserted "claws" in a short space, and I felt that the very inclusion of that word as an illustration seemed a little off. You used it to describe the presence of wind, and although this may be a personal perception, I don't think it blends well with the notion of moving air.

This point goes to both of you, could you try to shorten the length of your posts? Even if you make two or three posts, it breaks it up and makes it simpler to digest and reduces the chance that I'll walk over to the 360 for a self instituted break.

However, kudos to both of you. I will continue to read this story as it progresses, if only to see how it all ends and the true motives behind the elementalists' organisation. I hope I get to work with both of you in depth one day, if I find my way out of THE AFTERLIFE (hint hint.)

^_^

Thank you very much for the feedback. It's not often that I am treated to one that is so thorough (and the fact that it's mostly positive doesn't hurt, either).

You're right in that Belle is a compassionate soul. For all his strength and skill in combat, I've always felt that Belle is after the competition in something and the thrill he gets from fighting; actually hurting people is almost never an express purpose, and I don't think he's ever done it out of anything but service to some other goal (the Construct he did it to save people, Broken Dreams was because something tried to hurt Sayana, Soldier of Fortune was a case of kidnapping, etc.)

One thing that I feel I should point out, though, is that to call Blaze a "murderer" (for this saga, at least) is technically untrue. I'm sorry if my writing didn't make that clear. Blaze was supposed to have alluded to having 'dealt with' the guards, and - after provoking Hibiki into an attack (which separated Hibiki and Kaden) - reveal that the guards had run away. If Blaze had actually killed anyone, you would have seen a lot less compassion from Belle at the end of that fight.

We haven't seen Belle completely snap yet. When he does, I expect it'll be ugly.

If I have regrets about Shadow Play, they're:

1) The name, which ended up being a fairly 'buh?' title for what the story eventually morphed into being. There was originally supposed to be more about the mysterious missing weapons cache and cover-ups and such. Oh well, right? The duo saga apparently ended up being pretty good anyway, and I look forward to seeing how Kaden is going to wrap things up. (His will be either the last post, or the second to last, of this saga.)

2) NPCs. I didn't involve Sayana and Cog nearly as much as I could've, and the little bits in which I did include them feel, in the end, inadequate, to the point where I feel it might have been better not to include them at all. I originally wanted to have more time on the ship for Belle and Sayana to have more interaction (which would make the scene later between her and Cog a little more grounded), but that didn't pan out like I thought. When I started to think about it, Sayana's been through a lot of shit for a kid in a very short space of time. In anime it's sometimes easy for things to degenerate into slapstick, so I wanted to experiment and see how something like being kidnapped in the revolution and almost burning to death when her idolized hero didn't come to her rescue might affect the crew's resident loli.

I wanted to do that in R&R, but the saga kind of fell apart, so I decided to include Sayana's emotional aftermath in Shadow Play. In the end, though, it felt pretty 'off' to me when compared to the rest of the saga. Maybe I'll include a tail end of it if I need to post after Kaden and give some resolution there.

As to post length... Believe me, I know. It's easy to get carried away. Perhaps Kaden doesn't feel the same as I do, but I felt that we were continually raising the bar with one another throughout the saga. I didn't want to be perceived as 'slacking' after Kaden made a long one (especially after delaying for over a week), so I tried to whip up something just as lengthly. Even though I know quantity doesn't necessarily = quality, I still did it.

But sometimes, it (the post length) was completely unintentional. The last post I made, in my mind, was supposed to be short. After all, all that I wanted to do was show Belle's 'oosaru thought' and get Kaden to cut off Belle's tail while he was distracted. In my head, I thought "2k, tops!", but it ended up mushrooming to over 5500 words long or something ridiculous like that.

I'll try to avoid posts that ginormohuge in the future and keep to a steadier schedule. I've been wondering if something like writing 1k every day might be worth exploring, but we'll see. I've always been chronically unable to keep myself to a self-slated schedule.

Thank you again for the comments and critiques. It always feels great to know that you're actually being read, and I should really start returning the favor.