Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-26397825-20160113034906/@comment-24993958-20160114120919

Both of those are catch 22 lines I use when I critique because I find it’s shorter and more to the point than saying too many convenient things happened to a character  outside of his ability to influence it  for no other reason than the author wanting to make him important. Key word is convenient:

-Lost his parents at age 7 by a secret military he had no knowledge of existing…convenient;

-Said secret military leaves him alive so you can have him experimented on…convenient;

-He was considered a failure despite surviving and gaining abilities from the experiment so he can be buddy buddy with the other underpowered failures...convenient;

-Despite being a failure, he wasn’t left to die so the scientists wouldn’t have to spend manpower to keep an eye on him or the other failures from doing something crazy like oh I dunno, trying to run away?...convenient;

-You gave him a split personality that won’t freak out the other failures but will freak out the village he will be living in so you can get him to escape now and be hated by other people later…convenient;

-At the age of 10 all the failures banded to try and make it out, yet he’s the only one who does cause plot armor…convenient;

-He didn’t get hypothermia in the icy pool and die...convenient;

-He didn’t drown because “something” was there to save him...convenient;

-The cold somehow made him lose his memory...sure...why not...convenient;

-the experiments gave him tattoos to make a bunch of conveniently paranoid villagers who associated him with a convenient demonic myth conveniently hate him...have i mentioned convenient?

Now compare and contrast to the stuff say….Yang went through between age 7 and 10 that were outside of her control:

-Found out her mother was mother by proxy;

-Her real mother ditched her before she could even remember her face;

-Had to be saved by her uncle when she followed a lead in order to seek her real mother out.

Everything else happened through her actions. She found the picture of her mother while looking for it, she took Ruby with her and nearly got herself killed, and she decided to keep looking but be more careful after she got saved.

Notice the problem? Compared to Yang, your character is nothing more than a ball you kicked around to see where it lands. So I stand by what I said but will rephrase it to hopefully remove the ambiguity. Too many things happened that your character had either no control over or little to no influence in creating them for me to like his design or concept..