>>56473455It's a wonderful scene of imagery to get to paint, I tell you what.
>>56470720Rapid scene changing can work, but there needs to be some coherence to it. Everything is being fed to the reader like a shotgun and it's hard to tell why exactly I'm being fed this info. I think you were trying to showcase more of the internal trauma and the steps to overcome it in some of these, but the the build up just isn't there to give it that punch that you are intending it to have. Which kinda goes back to the characterizations being at odds. It's not that the characters themselves are at odds with themselves, struggling between one course of action and another, they're at odds with their current written traits and history. They are coming off as extremely mood swingy, or at worst, not at all like they were established to be so far. Them showing emotion is fine, but it needs to be tempered with how they would actually approach the situation. It reads like the plot is dictating how they should react instead of their own unique perspectives and feelings. For example, the thing with Polka just feels like she is being written off and put into her own hole for almost no reason. I know there's a decent story under all you've built so far, the final buildup of the plot at a very high level is interesting, but there just might have been a few too many things to juggle at once for your first go around with it.
