Ancient's Smashing Reviews

Holding Her Hands by @Hello_Cupid

I read three chapters. And Uh... yeah I read a thing.

TLDR; Tweedle-Crazy gets the wets for Tweedle-Dumb at gunpoint.

The plot, at its most basic level, is not a bad idea. Two people equally crazy can be a fun combination for a romance, a little bit like watching The Adam's Family where you see Morticia and Gomez meet and fall for each other with all the comedy, insanity, and superficial puppy-eyes and french-wrist-kissing and poetry you can expect. And you know what, I would read the shit out of that. It'd be hilarious!

However, when you try and take it any deeper, it becomes problems.

Let me see if I have these chain of events accurately. So, behind the scenes Tweedle-Dee says something annoying to Tweedle-Dumb while Tweedle-Crazy is somewhere in the building playing around with Tweedle-Dunce. Tweedle-Dumb pulls out a gun on Tweedle-Dee to let her know he doesn't love her. He fires the gun. the only people with a single braincell in a five-mile radius, which is everyone but these four named people, run while screaming. Tweedle-Crazy, just by turning in her seat, throws Tweedle-Dunce across the room, walks over, and begins to play with his hand painfully, to which Tweedle-Dunce is helpless. And then Tweedle-Crazy hears the gunshot and runs after it. Tweedle-Crazy stumbles upon Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb. Tweedle-Dumb goes into a speech about how he doesn't love Tweedle-Dee and she is just a one-night stand and Tweedle-Dee, while at gunpoint, professes her love and is entirely unaffected by the sight of the gun, nor the sound, nor the firing of it at her. Tweedle-Crazy's phone goes off, so Tweedle-Dumb turns and is enraptured with her and wants to know about her instantly, to which Tweedle-Dee gets jealous and demands to be acknowledged as a person by Tweedle-Dumb.

So, I have questions: 1. Why is everyone retarded? 2. If Tweedle-Dee was annoying, then why did Tweedle-Dumb bother taking her out? 3. If his approach to every annoyance is shoot-first and avoid-later, then he must run out of bullets daily. And if this isnt his regular approach, then what makes this different and why is he so retarded to as to come to this point on something so insignificant as to be worthy being in a shootout with cops over? 4. Why is his concern more to tell Tweedle-dee he doesn't love her, instead of the cops that should be storming the building already? 5. Why did none of the people running call the cops? 6. How did Tweedle-Crazy throw Tweedle-Dunce across the room by just turning in her chair? 7. How can you say this is his first time approaching a woman when he is so brazen and confident? That doesn't match up. 8. How can he be so weak as to be completely unable to pull his hand out of the grip of a young girl, who doesn't work out but just sits around all day typing on a laptop or phone, and when her hand is half the size of his and probably has 1/10th of the muscle mass? 9. Do his legs or other hand work? 10. Shouldn't she be drunk after 6-7 glasses of alcohol? Or at the very least need to piss the equivalent to her body weight in water? 11. Is Tweedle-Dee impervious to bullets? 12. Does she have no sense of fear? 13. Does she understand English? 14. Does she know what a gun looks like, especially when pointed at her face? 15. How can one of the main characters think that shooting in a club and causing people to scatter and run, where he doesn't blend in but stands there making a scene, will not earn him a place on the news but a random girl taking a picture of him will? 16. How can Tweedle-Dee be so obnoxiously narcissistic and mind-numbingly stupid that even while facing the barrel of a gun that the moment he stops pointing the gun at her that she is no longer a person in his eyes? 17. What the hell did I just have to write as #16??? 17. Again, why is everyone retarded?

And then the biggest question of all: 18. What is this story supposed to be?

If the story was supposed to be a comedy romance, with a major emphasis on COMEDY, then its bad because there is nothing comedic happening. Just stupidity.

If the story is supposed to be ANYTHING ELSE besides a comedy; then having everyone being so mind-numbingly incompotent and stupid so as to, not merely be bad at what they do but, fail just in the capacity to be called human beings, then it is just bad.

This feels like reading the punchline without the joke. Its just crazy and stupid people because stupidity is convenient to pushing the story along.

I truly do not understand why there is a seemingly endlessly growing pile of stories, as novels or screenwriting, where the cornerstone placed on purpose by the writers to progressing the story from one event to the next is incompetency. 

Incompotence does not make good characters. It makes obnoxious and annoying ones. It makes failure. Failure removes agency. Failure does not progress plot, it turns everything and everyone into a mary sue because the universe has to bend the rules in order to allow the story to merely exist.

Even the most brain-dead characters used in comedy, when done well, are good at something, and so use that thing they are good at to progress the plot.

Failure and incompotency is not the same thing as two characters being good at something, making intelligent decisions, but still lose the roll of the dice that is fate, or lose to one another because someone else is simply better. And you can still have random piano's falling on them because thats funny. But first you need to like them to give a shit. And you cannot do that with characters that are, BY DESIGN, THERE TO BE MOCKED. You can laugh at a character that is strong when funny/bad shit happens because you know they will pick themselves back up. But when you have characters that arent strong, you pity them and the circumstances. When you hev characters that are incompotent, they exist to be mocked by the readers and most esspecially the author as a punching bag.

Then you also have a lot of breaking the 4th wall which broke my immersion each and every time, and for some reason all the characters are men and women placed into very narrow stereotypes, which, while convenient to the story, are superficial and boring.

You have her friend and love as a female name but referring to her as an "It"? Is this person a girl, animal, or object? 

The story spends more time still telling us of her traits than just letting her have them to bring into the story so it has no impact to the narrative, and I very merely put it down on chapter 1 for that reason alone. Fortunately it showed us a bit of who she actually is by her actions and words in chapter 3, but unfortunately everyone showed was dumb as a houseplant.

Spends a lot of time telling us she has problems, telling us what her weaknesses are, instead of just letting her have the problems for us to see for ourselves. We got a scene from the character's book, but what relevance does this have to anything that is happening?

The prologue is just a repeat of the blurb. Why is this here? What part of this is a prologue?

The first chapter is a bit short but gets the story started properly. We have a logical chain of events and the conflict is clear, structured, and flows into the event to go out and draw a piece.

In terms of grammar the author's first language is not English so I will say it is better than expected, but still needs to be looked at by a friend whose first language is English. Most notably go to a friend and ask her to review punctuation and verb-tense. Beyond that, the story grammar was average, which I'd say is a positive in its favor! Good job!

I will not rate this story. I didn't read far enough to be able to be able to figure out what the overall potential of the story is in its final state. I simply couldn't get into it.