Comments on Chapter 1: This is Not a Joke of Birth of a Pilot

"Think of it like one of those crane machines, except you can actually pick things up with these!" This made me laugh so hard for some reason, good dig at claw machines.

I thought Angelo pointing out the pronouns was a good character moment personally, and you don't have to know Jun yet to get what's going on imo. And how everyone else reacted with a sort of "not right now" gesture/expression keeps it feeling real and like part of the scene.

Also, scientists pls check the specs and measurements before pushing the machine to the production stage! "Five feet no inches" is such a great way to describe his height. I love how everyone turns to him and claps, and he just awkwardly thanks everyone.

bulgariansumo

Crane machines are such a scam, I don't know how people are actually able to win anything with them!

Also, thank you! I'm glad I kept that scene in, especially because it pairs nicely with a scene in a later chapter.

Good advice for scientists everywhere. If this team followed it, maybe this story would've never had to happen this way!

bulgariansumo

Edit: Changed the edited part back to being closer to what it originally was. I felt like it fit better for both Angelo and Jun's characters and the story, but I still appreciate the critique.

Inspector-Spinda

It's sort of weird that you decided to do the story in the present tense. It's sort of unusual and sort of got me confused at first. I suppose if you really want to do it that way it's your called though. not going to make you rewrite 24 chapters. You wanted to know whether it caught my interest and it did. Other than the initial confusion it was an easily and breezey read. The one thing I'd say might need to be changed is the part where he wants to correct the guy on his pronouns. I think it feels off topic, especially since we don't even know the "Kim" character yet.

I think there's a niche of people who'd like this type of thing im a story very much, but the rest, even if they'd all for pronouns it real life aren't really going to care about it in the beginning of their sci-fi story. It might give people the wrong idea of what your story is really about if you throw it in so early.

I don't know what the rest of the story is about, but if pronouns are a constantly important topic or vital to the "Kim" character, I'd at least move it to after we already know who Kim is. Otherwise I'd cut it out. If your intention was to show something about Angelo's character like that he tends to nit-pick this type of thing, I'd show it in some other way initially and you can have him nit-pick pronouns at a more relevant moment.

bulgariansumo

Thank you for reading through this chapter! I appreciate your honesty, and it brought attention to a balancing issue I couldn't quite pinpoint on my own.

There are certain themes and issues I want to explore in my work as a whole but I often don't know where to put it and it sometimes ends up in really awkward places, like what you mentioned above. I did want to set up something about Angelo's character surrounding this incident, but upon further inspection, this might not be the story for that. For clarification's sake, in the series involving these characters, this isn't supposed to be the introductory story, but I do like having all of my stories set up in a way where a newcomer can jump in and get caught up with all the pertinent information, so that's also something I need to work on.

I'll see what I can do to revise this chapter and a few of the later chapters that have similar issues. Feel free to continue reading on, but even if you don't, thank you so much for reading through this and offering input! It really put some much-needed things into perspective for me.