Reviewer: Mr_M Signed
Date: August 16 2019
Title: Chapter 35: Redux Chapter 11 - Tensions
Well, while not a lot of action happened these previous two chapters but a lot happened storywise that I'd like to unpack my thoughts on:
10-A: We finally get to meet Heather's brother who... is basically Heather with more muscle definition and a penis attachment if the description serves. It was a simple scene but his point about Heather and Jason "Not doing their jobs right" since the enemy is STILL attacking despite them existing stuck with me and it's good it seems to have stuck with Heather in the next chapter too. Also, the fact that Mark apparently looks so uncannily like Heather leads me to believe Dr. Carter was still experimenting with cloning in this timeline.
10-B: Hoo-boy... so at the beginning you mentioned wanting to stay clear of the whole "growth unlocks the hidden potential of your brain and makes you literally god" thing, but now it's revealed you still get extra powers anyway which I'll just call brain jacking. Not sure how I feel about this since it makes Jason too OP now and possibly Heather and others later on. Having a character with too many advantages is an easy corner to put yourself in writing wise as not only do you have to take them down (if you intend to do so at all) but the manner in which it's done must be clever and satisfying. However, I think you're a good enough writer to not have to worry about it. The gainig other people's GP by eating them... I kind of saw comming since GP was first mentioned. After all, it would be really annoying if Heather was locked in at just over a mile or so while Jason can reach 5 times that. Though that leaves the question of how Heather can keep up. Maybe she recieved a special injection? Like, if you just inject her with war-criminals and deathrow inmates does that still count?
Continueing on, gaining people's memories was an odd choice. A key personality trait of Jason from the original timeline and even something AJ mentioned durring training was "Clever enough to read and manipulate people, but ultimately stupid and short sighted", but with him regularly eating people and gaining their experiences there is a danger of this going out the window. Since he doesn't seem to have any issues of identity from having the memories of multiple people's lifetimes in his noggin I'm guessing the brain jacking is only temporary. Like, things such as language that the victims did their entire lives without thinking sticks for a bit, but more specific and complex things like math, science, strategic planning, and that one song on the radio that got stuck in their head last week would fade rather quickly.
10-C: Not much happened here but AJ actually DOING sizey things is always an A+ in my book. I'm glad you addressed why a psycologist would be so important on a project like this to the point of having more sway than you'd think she would (gathering enough pieces of real shrunken cities to make a bigger one for training purposes doesn't just happen) and her analogy of Heather and Jason essentially being dumb kids who inherited a fortune was spot on. AJ Size Experimentation Journal spinoff when?
11: No action here but it makes up for it with how it moves the story along. As if my incessant whining about how focused on Jason this story has been has actually made a difference the characters seem to be noticing it too. Ben is now fully regretting his agreement to the menage a trois specifically because Jason seems to be monopolizing him (outside of training I feel like Heather only played with him twice, and both times ended with Jason getting both of them).
Jason himself is FAR too vocal about his willingness to eat a city, and how "today is the day", "everything is going to change", and "after today there will be no more missions" which AJ probably should have picked up on and made a case to not let him on further missions. I mean, even if Jason only said these things while he and heather were alone you'd think the military would have transport vehicles, living quarters, and apartments bugged and monitored. A case could be made that with their enhanced senses they may notice these things somehow, but I'd think the project wouldn't be able to progress in the first place if the military didn't have way of countering it so they could keep their manmade titans in check.
Heather for her part has the most development in this chapter. Mark's words really stuck with her and made her re-evaluate how she and Jason have been handling their new powers, and even called Jason out on his treatment of Ben. Seeing her also struggle with her OWN treatment of him and everything was nice too. From a fetish point of view, yeah, we love to see Heather all power mad and hungry, taking advantage and doing what she wants, but as a character we also love to see that she does genuinely love Ben and how it conflicts with the unbridled horniness this power gives her. Her grilling of Jason on how he's been using his pheramones plants a nice little seed of mistrust. While without question he's been using it on Ben, especially without her permission, his backpeddling makes it seem like he HAS been using it on her, and even if he really didn't, there is no real reason she'd believe him at this point. Assuming it works like shrinking there pheramones shouldn't affect each other when they are of equal height, but when one has a destinct size advantage over the other the smaller party should be susceptible, and Heather seemed far more willing to be tiny for Jason than one would think.
Which leads us back to AJ frantic and needing Ben for something, hinting that something BAD happened on the mission. One would assume it went off exactly as planned, Jason ate the city, gained far more GP than he should, and went out of control... but you wouldn't really need Ben of all people for that. Instead I have to wonder if Heather's new mindset caused her to overcompensate and be more proactive during the mission, somehow allowing her to start surpassing Jason. Maybe AJ's idea of Jason holding Heather back was literal and her thinking she's not taking to this as well as Jason put a mental limit on her GP, one that has just been unlocked. Maybe thinking Jason can no longer be trusted, she just bites the bullet and starts eating people before Jason can get to them first. Whatever the case may be, I look forward to the next chapter and whatever you come up with.
The only real issue I have though is this chapter feels like it's building up to a climax, which in turn would imply the story is comming to an end. I had hoped this story would be at least as long as the previous one, but despite my own desires I understand you're not my personal writing monkey and you do have a life outside of this, so if it ends, it ends.
And that's all I have! Sorry for the super wordy review. I don't know if my constant bitching about M/m got on your nerves (though to be clear I do enjoy M/f. perhaps later AJ/heather/both could shrink themselves for Ben? make some bad london clocktower jokes?) but I wanted to get my thoughts out here to show how invested I am. This is probably one of my favorite stories of all time, to the point where when my session timed out writing all of this out and didn't save it I took the time to rewrite it from memory instead of just giving up or tossing out a simple "Good job as always". It actually happened twice but the second time I had the forsight to copy and paste it! That said, keep it up and I look forward to the future.
...the clocktower is his penis.
Author's Response: Lots to respond to here.
Firstly, thank you for just taking the time. I'll just put that up top because I appreciate your investment in the story and your feedback, deeply.
10-A) So, second, there isn't a Dr. Carter cloning/genetic manipulation subplot at work here. I've just dated girls who had eerily similar looking siblings of the opposite gender, and I always found it interesting how physical similarities seems to correlate with sibling closeness. Nothing sinister at work here, and probably a detail I didn't need to throw in.
There was however a point when I thought it would be a good time to introduce Dr. Carter, and give her ambitions and twisted things to do, but that point has passed. There are actually a lot of things I'd like to add to this story, but there's not enough time. And I’m doing my best not to retread old plots anyway.
10-B) Yeah couple things here. One, I may not have phrased it well but I wanted to avoid having this weird sort of moment where once you cross a certain threshold of growth your brain just clicks into divinity? I guess? So there was a point where I wanted to write this story with them acquiring powers from people they ate during interrogations, because some people are born with latent powers that don't get unlocked, but then the Growth Potential project somehow unlocked them... And I'm like.. This is too messy. I think it's just simpler to have a natural progression of ability unlocking (which isn't necessarily linear or the same for everyone, ie different people gain different abilities in different orders) as one ascends the growth ladder. It isn't ideal, but it's a bit more interesting to me than the standard "people get big and crush things" plots.
Heather can definitely catch up. By this point in the story, Jason's only eaten a handful (ha ha) of interrogation subjects, and we don't actually know what their potentials were. However, we do know that Jason and Heather both have very abnormally high potentials. Maybe most people can only grow an inch or meter.
To your point about Jason, I wanted there to actually be a useful reason as to why the two giants would even be enticed to eat anyone at all. Like, Jason discovers this thing about himself retaining people's memories, and the military sees value in it. It’s one thing to brainwash people into “tell me everything you know,” but it’s a whole ‘nother thing to just know everything they know. Of course now his head is filled with chicken memories too. In hindsight, it would've been a good thing to mention that Heather is a vegetarian, otherwise we can surmise she's having the same problems.
The mind is naturally complex and the way in which we even access our memories is messy and imperfect. I learned all my times tables as a kid, plus three languages (two of which I don't even speak anymore), and yet the older I get the harder time I'm having figuring out just what the hell 8x4 is. So, does consuming someone else’s memory give you the same fidelity of recall that they had? Is it worse? Better? Does it get harder the more memories you consume? If Jason eats a thousand people, does he start to lose his own identity and fracture his psyche into a thousand pieces?
The important distinction, to me anyway, is that gaining someone’s memories does not mean you add to your own intellect. Jason, by the way, isn’t a dumb guy per se, he’s just surrounded by really intelligent people. AJ in particular is supposed to be pretty brilliant, and if I had more time to expand her character we’d really get into that, but she’s also kind of snide and condescending. So of course she thinks he’s dumb.
10-C) So if I had more time here I would, as I said before, really explore her character and her role in all this. I would’ve liked to have shown how she started as a necessary rubber stamp for the project that nobody really liked or listened to, she gathered influence, and boosted her role. But, this is of course a fetish story, and we’re all really just here to see people fuck in weird ways.
I enjoy AJ as a character, at least how I visualize her. Whether it comes through in the writing or not is a different matter, of course. But I see her as this really fun, witty, brilliant person, who has a dark sense of humor, is very sexually liberated, and has a huge superiority complex. She’d make a fun giant. Will we get her? No promises.
11) I definitely wanted Jason to get a lot more play in this arc. Male giants don’t get much screentime. It’s not for everyone. And I want him to be this sort of existential threat that sort of gets his tentacles into everything. Like, Heather seems to be just letting him get away with it too, which is disconcerting from Ben’s point of view.
If I had more time (I said it again) I’d have given this story a few more passes before publishing, and fleshed out the interactions better so we see Heather and Ben, together, alone. And pop in some more hints that maybe there are other reasons as to why Heather cedes so much to Jason. We get that finally in this chapter though, I hope. Heather reveals that in fact she’s scared of herself and her own use of power, and yet she’s even scared not to have it and not to use it. Meanwhile, Jason has no conflict, and to me that’s the far scarier position to take.
I could’ve fleshed this out better, but as you say, Jason is quite open about his intentions. There’s a geopolitical aspect to this that I’m really trying to stay far, far away from, which is that Heather and Jason are super patriots and they hate the enemy for whatever reason. I don’t want to step in those waters because I actually do love my country, even if it is flawed, and I don’t even want to imply that they’re going to war against, say China. It’s a fictional enemy that they are both super motivated to destroy. Heather can also go along with this, at least to an extent, because the enemy is a real threat to her family, and there are families everywhere threatened by enemies of all kinds. For one of them to gain this omnipotent power and end all violence, well, that’s kind of a big deal for her. But it’s also terrifying.
There was a point when I made the conscious decision not to involve wiretapping or monitoring. Whether the military has viable countermeasures or not I won’t say. What I will say is we built the bomb in the 40’s, and the only countermeasures to the bomb was more bombs and bigger ones. The entire military industrial complex upturned thousands of miles of land and a dozen communities, and focused them on the single goal of producing weapons grade plutonium, and now the genie is totally out of the bottle. No going back. We also ended the war having created and used only two bombs. I very much see Heather and Jason as metaphorical atomic bombs.
How do the pheromones work? Why do they think they can’t shrink each other but then it turns out they can (provided one of them is already larger than the other)? I don’t want to be guilty of hand-waving away these issues, so I’ll just say this. To go back to the bomb analogy, there’s a hell of a lot more that we know now than we did when we detonated the first test. The first atomic bomb that was ever detonated had physicists worried, because they weren’t entirely certain if it would trigger a chain reaction and ignite the atmosphere. Luckily it didn’t, and they did back of the envelope calculations to demonstrate that it wouldn’t, but there are so many emergent complexities of every technology that we just can’t know until they’re put into use and studied. Making matters worse, I’ve seen a lot of technologies being marketed with total confidence in how they work, and surprise surprise, they do something unintended.
No comment about your plot predictions.
Yes, the story is approaching its climax. I hope to have it finished in the next week or two. I’d love for this story to go on for a year, but it is quite time consuming. Everything in my life is good, but for personal reasons, the closing chapters of Growth Potential will very likely be the last I write for any story (bad news for fans of The Intern, I had a pretty goddamn great ending planned for that one).
Ben doesn’t really get to be big. I don’t know if this is something I’m doing right or terribly wrong, but I’ve given Ben almost zero agency in both iterations of this story. He’s a smart, independent guy, who’s kind of grumpy and likes to throw rocks at the powerful, but... He spends most of the time as an object. And if I had more time I’d flesh out how degrading that experience is for him and just how much it wears him down. Instead, we get a line about him being mopey.
HOWEVER. There was one ending to the previous version of the story that never got written. It was called “The Atheist” and all I’ll say is Ben wins, and we meet him a couple years later and he’s quite changed by his experience. He is much more muscular and menacing and has greying hair and dead eyes, and he bumps into Jason in an airport bar and they strike up a conversation. It’s implied Heather isn’t talking to Ben anymore because he tricked her and deprived her of her glory. And Jason even feels vaguely threatened by Ben too. Oh and we learn where Ben got his damn watch, which was a story that was representative of how people underestimate him and he can, in fact, take down giants.
But of course, if I had more time.
Thank you, we still have some more chapters ahead. Best
