Date: April 08 2025 6:19 PM Title: Trust but Verify
Damn, lots of feels this chapter. Kinda iffy how fast he got over it, but at least things seemed to be going better. Also good to know that the girl isn't a completely monster, merely an idiot.
'So yeah, all that character work is still there and still relevant.'
Nah. You pulled a 180 in the narrative direction (which was a long, arduous recovery for a lot of people, and a lot of issues), and ended it up in a cliffhanger via pulling the rug in order to go 'it's a gentle story'. I mean, it's your prerogative where you go with your stories (duh!), but let's call a spade a spade.And as for tags, the only one is the slave tag. All the others, including the intro and the story itself, do not match with 'hard story'.
Anyway, that's my final two cents on this. It's kinda unrelated so I didn't want to comment, but getting called out is annoying. Let's agree to disagree on this.
Author's Response:
How about this: You agree to disagree and I'll agree with virtually everyone else who read the ending of the story and say you're wrong?
Look, if you had just said, "I thought the ending was shit, and I didn't like it" or "That ending really put a sour note on the story for me," I wouldn't have an issue with it. But instead, you said something that wasn't only wrong but is objectively stupid.
There is no "180 in the directional narrative." You don't even know what the narrative of the second story looks like. All I said was that the tone was going to be different and that it wouldn't be as gentle. I didn't say it would be completely opposite of the first story. The sad thing is that part of the reason that I split this story up like that in the first place was to avoid nonsense like this from the more militant gentle crowd, but now here it is seeping into the reviews of an entirely different story. Now that's annoying!
Those "long, arduous recoveries" (I think I kind of get what you mean by this?) for each person who went through it is no less relevant now than they were before the ending. In fact, the aftermath of those emotional journeys and the relationships built along the way are not only not undone by the ending, but they're going to be used as the foundation of the second story, which obviously I couldn't do if these things (you know, the heart and soul of the story) were "undone."
Now, if the twist at the end had been Duncan suddenly growing himself back to normal size, pulling out a shrink ray, and shrinking Callie, only for him to yell, "ACTING!" in a smug Shakespearean style of speaking with a single finger triumphantly raised in the air, you'd have me. That would have completely undone everything the story had built between Callie and Duncan. Instead, the final lines of the last chapter are all about Callie finding some small degree of comfort in a hopeless situation by leaning on her strong relationship with Duncan. That's the complete opposite of "undoing" what the story built.
Literally nothing from throughout the story has been undone. Everything that has happened to each and every character still matters and will play a role in how they handle what's to come. This is just a case of you not liking the cliffhanger ending and the fact that I gave a heads up that the continuation won't be as gentle. Again, if you had just said that, I would have just said, "Cool. Thanks!" and we could have just moved on. But I'm always going to respond when someone mischaracterizes my work.
It's really ironic to me that you feel like the violent, crush, and vore tags don't make this story a "hard story." Not because I disagree, necessarily, but if you honestly feel that way, then you're even more wrong about that whole "180" thing than you even realize! But given how upset you get at the smallest bit of tension to a lot of these stories (yet not a word out of you about the rape and a half that took place in Roomies, weirdly enough), I don't think you can fault me for thinking that those tags would scare you off.
And yeah, I completely agree that getting called out is annoying. It certainly was when you did it to me in your first review of this story for no reason. Not only that, but what you called me out for was wrong and ridiculous, which makes it even worse. At least you actually deserve to be called out.