[FFML] Draxon's Review Corner!

Don't ask me why, but after three bad days in a row I have suddenly found the time to finally finish up a ton of backlogged tasks I had been delaying involving my writing and reviewing. A Demon's Delight is being worked on, fanfics are being read... Gee, I think I might be getting something done here!

To start things off, this is possibly the hardest review I've taken up in quite a while. I had never read anything by Adrian, so I didnt know what to expect from him. I'm not a big Tenchi fan, and have never read any Tenchi fanfics up to this point, and my very limited knowledge of Tenchi canon keeps me from being the law on things such as characterization. Anyway, enough with the disclaimer: On to the review!

It took a while for me to grow really interested in this story, but once events drew into perspective I enjoyed the read. I always have a problem with mid-sized stories such as this in that they are good, but I always seem to think they would have been better in an epic length volume of tales. I guess that should be taken as a compliment if I wanted to see more.

For the uninformed, Ki-Ohki centers around the 'Cabbit Swarm', an event that occurs when the masses of cabbits gather together to breed, and a few interesting things happen this time around. We get to see Kiyone with a cabbit, which turned out to be a lot more interesting than one might think, as Adrian took a good deal of time exploring the relationship between a cabbit and it's human partner. There are also some interesting scenes between Ryoko and Sasami that worked out nicely, if not a little oddly. One thing I think that could have been improved was the ending; The story abruptly stopped seemingly in the middle of the climax of the story. I felt that some more closure would have worked nicely, but I can also sympathize with any author that is trying to find a good cut off point for a story.

Characterizations: I'm keeping mum on this one, since I'm really not the Tenchi expert. Anyone care to donate an opinion? (Hint: Read the book and talk about it. Part of the point of the corner is to boost an author's C&C intake)

Drama: 8 Some scenes get pretty emotional, but until you get toward the end there are no life or death battles going on. The Ryoko/Sasami scenes score a few points here.

Originality: 9 Take this one with a grain of salt, but I have to award an automatic high score on this one, since it is my first Tenchi fic. Then again, unless another fic was written along these lines before it would get it anyway.

Grammar: 10 Great work in this area, I didn't pick out any errors. I'm not a proponent of double spaced-non-indented paragraphs for prose writing (even though I'm using them now) but it didn't get on my nerves this time around and other people appearently like it. Enjoy the ten :)

Descriptions: 8 Better than adequate. You did a very good job with the telapathic link between Ki-Ohki and Kiyone, and I guess that would be the part that stood out the most in that area for me. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Overall: 8.5 While not being my favorite style of fanfiction (which happens to be megavolume stories) Ki-Ohki is definately a good read. I was able to attach to the story without very much Tenchi in my blood, and that is a good sign that those that have deeper Masaki roots will be able to enjoy the fanfic to it's fullest extent.

Well, here it is, finally. If I can bring myself to work hard at this reviewing stuff I am really capable of pumping out at least a review a day. My thanks to everyone for showing patience as I worked through other problems and tasks that continually presented themselves to me for the past few weeks. My next review will either be a Boku no Marie fanfic by Matt Johnston entitled Music-Box Angel or Madam Hydra's Tiger Claw, a Ranma 1/2 project. The fanfic chosen will depend entirely on how comfortable I feel with publicly reviewing another series I dont know much about. I can ramble about Ranma for pages and pages from a one line comment, so please understand my desire to get to that particular review :P

Does anyone have a few good Bubblegum Crisis fics out there that they could send to me for the purpose of reviewing? That is my other flagship series and so far I've had exactly 0 submissions for it. Thanks.