AwkwardMD and Omenainen Review Thread

My Humiliating Immigration Exam, by b7ffh1

Link

I'm gonna keep this one brief because this was my second time reading this story, and the other one was also quite similar.

I feel like you technically hit all the points that I suggested, but it still hasn't come together in a way that feels organic. The dialog felt more perfunctory, describing exactly what the scene requires and not a word more, rather than conversational or authentic to the characters.

If I had to guess why, I would say the problem is that you are clearly telling a "story". There's a described background with specific details relevant to the plot, and then the inciting incident that moves the plot forward, and at every step along the way the perspective is clinical and aware of the fact that it is telling a story. It's like we're being walked through a storytelling checklist.

At no time do I feel like I'm watching a scene unfold as life happens to human beings. Instead, I feel like I'm watching a puppet show where the puppeteer is plainly visible. The Puppeteer tells me what's happening, and then only stops down to do the characters voices for the most important lines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgs-saf5Se8

I have linked this video before, but it is immensely valuable. The whole thing is strong, but pay particular attention between 2:00 and 3:30, and pause the video at 2:33. This is what I feel like I'm seeing.

It also doesn't help that the specific things you wanted to happen in this story are so out of the ordinary. In a longer story, you could have maybe done more setup to have these things come together more naturally, but in a short form it feels contrived.


EDIT: It is probably important for me to point out that my suggestions and feedback are geared toward helping you become a better, more complete writer in the broad sense. A brief look at the comments on this story shows that you are succeeding with (what I can assume is) the intended audience of this story, but gearing your writing for a niche audience is myopic. Growth will require stepping out of that comfort zone a little.

AwkwardMD said:

Link



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgs-saf5Se8

I have linked this video before, but it is immensely valuable. The whole thing is strong, but pay particular attention between 2:00 and 3:30, and pause the video at 2:33. This is what I feel like I'm seeing.

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I haven't seen that video before. It's excellent. I'd recommend that to anyone.

I think the idea that "plot is character" is true for a very good story, but it's really hard to do well. And it's especially hard in a short story, where you don't give yourself many words to develop characters. There's a real art to revealing character in just a few lines.

It's something I try to work on but never feel that I quite get there.

The Woodman Stark Trilogy: Prologue

I spent an hour reading these. Before I spend 2 hours writing up my feedback, though, I want bring up a comment of yours.

Thank you for the kind words. At least a couple more chapters are planned, and you can read the conclusion (epilogue) now.

"Fantasy after fantasy" is the entire point of this one. If you're looking for plot, this one's not for you. If you're looking to stroke, that's what I'm trying to deliver here.

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I don't really get the feeling that you're open to the kind of criticism I give, which is specific to storytelling, plot, characterization, and strong writing. It doesn't seem like those things concern you. If you really want me to go through with writing this up, I will, but it will be a waste of both our times if you're not really open to it.

AwkwardMD said:

I spent an hour reading these. Before I spend 2 hours writing up my feedback, though, I want bring up a comment of yours.



I don't really get the feeling that you're open to the kind of criticism I give, which is specific to storytelling, plot, characterization, and strong writing. It doesn't seem like those things concern you. If you really want me to go through with writing this up, I will, but it will be a waste of both our times if you're not really open to it.

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That comment is specific to the epilogue's preceding story, which as I said is optional - you don't have to read it unless you want to know more about what happened to him the previous night.
[Edit] Wait, you didn't read the whole thing did you? I told you you could stop after Chapter 2.

I'm open to your feedback on the Jennifer arc. I've read some of this thread and I'm interested in what you have to say about my work.

Thank you so much for reviewing the story and taking the time to give feedback. I really appreciated the video you linked. The segments you highlighted were very insightful.

The next segment were they talk about Rogue One (starting at 3:05) especially hit me. When I saw Garreth Edwards the director of Rogue One describing his directing style as having a series of visual milestones that he wanted to see and then trying to find a way to link them all together, he could have been talking about me.

I am primarily visual, even in my reading and writing. The way I conceive of my stories is like a movie with specific visual scenes that I want to have. Then my writing becomes a means of describing those scenes and trying to set up the scenes and transition from one scene to another. All my stories are like that.

Frankly, getting away from that style seems scary and likely will involve a lot of practice.

Thank you for your feedback and giving me have a greater self-awareness of my style and its weaknesses.

AwkwardMD said:

Link

I'm gonna keep this one brief because this was my second time reading this story, and the other one was also quite similar.

I feel like you technically hit all the points that I suggested, but it still hasn't come together in a way that feels organic. The dialog felt more perfunctory, describing exactly what the scene requires and not a word more, rather than conversational or authentic to the characters.

If I had to guess why, I would say the problem is that you are clearly telling a "story". There's a described background with specific details relevant to the plot, and then the inciting incident that moves the plot forward, and at every step along the way the perspective is clinical and aware of the fact that it is telling a story. It's like we're being walked through a storytelling checklist.

At no time do I feel like I'm watching a scene unfold as life happens to human beings. Instead, I feel like I'm watching a puppet show where the puppeteer is plainly visible. The Puppeteer tells me what's happening, and then only stops down to do the characters voices for the most important lines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgs-saf5Se8

I have linked this video before, but it is immensely valuable. The whole thing is strong, but pay particular attention between 2:00 and 3:30, and pause the video at 2:33. This is what I feel like I'm seeing.

It also doesn't help that the specific things you wanted to happen in this story are so out of the ordinary. In a longer story, you could have maybe done more setup to have these things come together more naturally, but in a short form it feels contrived.


EDIT: It is probably important for me to point out that my suggestions and feedback are geared toward helping you become a better, more complete writer in the broad sense. A brief look at the comments on this story shows that you are succeeding with (what I can assume is) the intended audience of this story, but gearing your writing for a niche audience is myopic. Growth will require stepping out of that comfort zone a little.

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AwkwardMD said:

Link

At no time do I feel like I'm watching a scene unfold as life happens to human beings. Instead, I feel like I'm watching a puppet show where the puppeteer is plainly visible. The Puppeteer tells me what's happening, and then only stops down to do the characters voices for the most important lines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgs-saf5Se8

I have linked this video before, but it is immensely valuable. The whole thing is strong, but pay particular attention between 2:00 and 3:30, and pause the video at 2:33. This is what I feel like I'm seeing.

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Thanks for the link and explanations too. I have a story in time out because I feel I'm using too much dialogue to create depth in characters and not enough exposition. I'll pull it out again sometime and re-read it with this video in mind though- thanks for the link.

I want to expand on that video for a moment.

There's a line in there from Nic Pizzolato saying "The only place anything ever comes alive is in character."

Imagine a planet that has a dense atmosphere of a specific isotope of Oxygen. Oxygen-14. The local flora produces it. Oxygen-14 is not a stable isotope, so it tends to absorbs more electrons over time and until it becomes Oxygen-16 (a stable isotope, and the most common isotope found on Earth).

Now imagine the awe of the first human who sets down on that planet and sees the difference this detail makes in a setting: a bright green streaks across and through the blue sky at sunrise. Imagine how you could write their awe, and their experience of the majesty of it. How they fall in love with the place.

It is the observation of a phenomenon that makes it phenomenal, not the details.

Jennifer, by WoodmanStark

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I did read all three. I should clarify that my opening post’s limitation on chapters assumed that a chapter would be longer. The entirety of your submitted works was only 15k or so, and that’s not beyond me to get through in one sitting. When I first started giving feedback, I was asked by a writer to read his story, from the beginning, because he wanted to know “if the twist in chapter 26 worked like he hoped it did”. With Cthulu as my witness, I tried to read through the whole thing so that I could answer his question, but it was too much. It was like 300k words. I spent weeks slogging through it, and gave up somewhere around chapter 18 because there was already too much to go through in my feedback.

***

Just to be clear, I’m only really going to review Jennifer. I’ll reference the other two occasionally to support an argument, but for the most part I’m going to limit the scope to this one story.

***

At a nuts and bolts level, this is a fairly well written story. The writing doesn’t get in the way, and the word picture you paint is pretty strong. Kudos.

***

Jennifer is not a person, or a well-realized character. She is a collection of details. She is a list of interests and dimensions that sometimes talks.

In less than an hour of conversation, he decided that Jennifer was one of the coolest people he'd ever met, a nerd after his own heart.

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My heart sank when I read this line, because that was the moment that I realized that I wasn’t going to get to see her character or her personality at all. I was just going to get a “Trust me, she’s pretty cool”. This was your chance to make a strong first impression, and what’s on the page is as flat as a pancake.

An uncharitable interpretation of this is that her personality doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s the protagonist’s idea of fun, and while that may be interesting to you, the author, it’s unconvincing to the rest of us. Jennifer is a trope and a cliche.

The sex goddess is further proof that this is not just an isolated example of a single character not well fleshed out. Your women aren’t people. They’re just props (read: things) or fantasy (read: one dimensional). No woman I know really enjoys being appreciated for any one aspect of themselves. Like, it’s nice that hubs think I’m pretty, and I’m glad he likes my tits, but it’s his ability to hold a conversation with me that I appreciate the most.

I think the thing that hurt you the most here was the scope. You wanted to tell a story that takes place over months and months in 4k words, and that meant that you had to cover a dozen interactions very briefly. I would rather have read about one meaningful interaction in detail, like the meet-cute I was promised in the description, rather than getting this surface-level summary of so many.

***

So many details. Too many details. Too many pieces of information jammed into this that simply didn’t matter. My eyes glazed over completely during the regurgitation of Jennifer’s interests. The TV shows they watched, and in what order. At one point, I was sure I’d wandered into paid advertising for the air fryer industry. The specific number of beats per minute.

All empty. None of them led to anything. No part of those recitations backed up or reinforced anything else. They were just there to fill space and move things along.

There is a literary principle called Chekhov’s gun that I think could be of great help to you. It states that:

every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. Elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play.

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Don’t describe things that don’t matter. Be purposeful. Figure out where you’re going with something, and then work backwards to show hints of that along the way.


To be clear, Chekhov’s gun is difficult to adhere to in the strictest sense. There will always be some details that don’t ultimately matter but just help to paint the picture, but limiting them is good exercise.

Also, there are some stories that intentionally subvert this by chasing down red herrings and dead ends, but I would argue that mastering Chekhov’s Gun is essential in executing a really successful red herring.

Learn how to be economical. Learn how to tell a simple story straight through, and master the basics.

We bought an air fryer recently. Absolutely marvellous. And so easy. Much easier than writing.

Emirus said:

We bought an air fryer recently. Absolutely marvellous. And so easy. Much easier than writing.

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Right?

...and Doc Awk, I'm still digesting your feedback (as recommended back at the beginning of this thread).
But I will say right now that it's exactly the kind of hard truth I signed up for when I said "make me cry."

@SisterJezabel

AwkwardMD said:

I also felt like you didn’t really go into the allure of straying. It is thrilling to have a secret, as well as to be ‘getting away with it’. When you know something other people don’t, that is power. Molly could have been privately getting off (literally or metaphorically) on her office flirtations. Loving it, and loving that it’s a secret. She’s in her 40’s, and she finally has a dirty little secret of her own! Even if she didn’t plan to stray, and even if Andreas was pushing for her to stray and Stuart worrying about her straying, all it would take is that one more straw for her to give in to her curiosity. That's the line you're trying to walk the reader right up to.

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I can't believe I didn't mention this, but earlier in the thread there was an amazing example of the allure of straying: Vix_Giovanni's Ten Thousand Spoons. For anyone wanting to write a story about affairs, and getting away with it, and dirty little secrets, take a stroll through that and absorb how she did it.

Visit Summary

AwkwardMD said:

Jennifer is not a person, or a well-realized character. She is a collection of details. She is a list of interests and dimensions that sometimes talks.

Quote:
[In less than an hour of conversation, he decided that Jennifer was one of the coolest people he'd ever met, a nerd after his own heart.]
My heart sank when I read this line, because that was the moment that I realized that I wasn’t going to get to see her character or her personality at all. I was just going to get a “Trust me, she’s pretty cool”. This was your chance to make a strong first impression, and what’s on the page is as flat as a pancake.

An uncharitable interpretation of this is that her personality doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s the protagonist’s idea of fun, and while that may be interesting to you, the author, it’s unconvincing to the rest of us. Jennifer is a trope and a cliche.

The sex goddess is further proof that this is not just an isolated example of a single character not well fleshed out. Your women aren’t people. They’re just props (read: things) or fantasy (read: one dimensional). No woman I know really enjoys being appreciated for any one aspect of themselves. Like, it’s nice that hubs think I’m pretty, and I’m glad he likes my tits, but it’s his ability to hold a conversation with me that I appreciate the most.

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You're certainly correct about the sex goddess, that's all she is: a prop in a stroke story. My male lead (who also started as a prop in a stroke story) is also much the same as when I created him and we still don't know his name.
I had higher ambitions for Jennifer, and you're absolutely right - I let her and the reader down (I also let myself down, but fuck that guy.)
I'm familiar with the concept "show, don't tell," and lunch at the burger joint was the place to show the "funny, charming, and whip-smart" young woman that our man basically falls in love with the first day he meets her. Instead of writing the conversation that would have shown her to the reader, and shown him becoming enamored of her, I took a lazy copout.
But even now when I try to envision that conversation I come up empty. What draws me to another person is a combination of shared passions, and compatible values and philosophy. "Shared passions" is too easy, as I demonstrated in my presented work. I have a harder time inventing a conversation conveying their values and philosophies that doesn't start as, or quickly become, an anti-religious or political rant (remember, the only mention of them being materialists is in the "Sex Goddess" epilogue when it's relevant to what they're talking about.) I'm thinking about just brainstorming it by starting to write a dialogue, however vapid and banal, and seeing if it wanders anywhere interesting.
There's a more fully realized Jennifer in my head, but it seems my skills currently aren't quite up to illustrating her in writing, much like how I can't draw a visual picture of her either.

AwkwardMD said:

I think the thing that hurt you the most here was the scope. You wanted to tell a story that takes place over months and months in 4k words, and that meant that you had to cover a dozen interactions very briefly. I would rather have read about one meaningful interaction in detail, like the meet-cute I was promised in the description, rather than getting this surface-level summary of so many.

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I've been wanting to write this story over since shortly after publishing it; I think on some level I already knew the things you said above. If I can get Jennifer right and bring her to life, I could also write more than a couple meaningful interactions. Maybe I'll even give him a name.

The rest of your critique I'll back-burner for now (I'm familiar with Chekhov's Gun.) You are pretty much right, but properly depicting Jennifer is more important; the story is pointless without her.

Thank you for your time and indulgence (did that post really take two hours to write?)
Also, thank you for your candor. I said "make me cry" and you didn't disappoint.

I'm going to recommend a story of mine as an example of using dialog and the story, rather than narration, to show who characters are.

As you read through it, try to be reading it critically rather than just for content or for enjoyment. What is each scene achieving? How are the characters communicating with each other? How is attraction being conveyed? How is their relationship being explored, and how (if at all) is it progressing?

My writing is not 'the right way to do it', and you may come away thinking that I failed more than I succeeded, but that's okay. Think through your conclusions, and then try to use that on your next story to set yourself up to succeed.

AwkwardMD said:

I'm going to recommend a story of mine as an example of using dialog and the story, rather than narration, to show who characters are.

As you read through it, try to be reading it critically rather than just for content or for enjoyment. What is each scene achieving? How are the characters communicating with each other? How is attraction being conveyed? How is their relationship being explored, and how (if at all) is it progressing?

My writing is not 'the right way to do it', and you may come away thinking that I failed more than I succeeded, but that's okay. Think through your conclusions, and then try to use that on your next story to set yourself up to succeed.

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Thanks for the recommendation. I looked at your list of "word piles" but most of your stuff is in categories that don't interest me. I'll read this one tho' and try to focus on what you said.

WoodmanStark said:

Thanks for the recommendation. I looked at your list of "word piles" but most of your stuff is in categories that don't interest me. I'll read this one tho' and try to focus on what you said.

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Haha, I've just started but I think its funny that the story you suggest to me as an example of developing a character, features a protagonist who doesn't know who she herself is

AwkwardMD said:

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It’s interesting how this story shares some base level details with the last one I reviewed, as both are about men who are (more or less) slaves to the women in their lives, but they differ quite a bit from there. My BBW Cuckold Story paints a more subtle picture of emotional manipulation, and a character who has agency in their life despite his reluctance to use said agency in any way.

Colin, the protagonist, is a really well fleshed-out toady. He’s Patton Oswalt’s Max to Felicia Day’s Kinga Forrester, destined to live in her shadow pining for Lucy’s attention. He’s pathetic, self-aware, and kind of hates himself for his inaction, but at the same time he also seems to get a kind of compersion (happiness or joy at someone else’s happiness) from providing for Lucy’s lifestyle. It almost seems like he’s living with an e-girl, paying an exorbitant amount to her OnlyFans even though she doesn’t do nudity, and while it’s not an ideal situation he does get some secondary benefits.

I gotta tell you, that’s a lot of good layers. Say what you will about how desirable those traits are in a male lead, this character was really well thought-out.

The whole story is like that. I even liked the use of a flashback here, filling in who Mark Reilly is after Mark has been introduced as a rival love interest. It served a purpose (huzzah!), and was very well executed. I am usually death on the use of flashbacks, but this was a textbook case of how to do it right.

There’s also foreshadowing! Holy hell, foreshadowing! Early on, Colin frets over leaving a mess, knowing that if Lucy finds a mess he will have hell to pay, and then the chapter ends with Lucy finding a mess and there is about to be hell to pay! Foreshadowing is how you show you knew what you were doing all along.

***

The one thing I will pick at is that I feel like you didn’t challenge yourself to a project commensurate with your skill. This is, like, 20% of the story. It’s the beginning of something wonderful, and it is a hell of an opening act, but I think you are capable of doing a lot more. Yes, this is just the first chapter, but I think you could have set the bar much higher and written something self-contained.

***

This was well written, well conceived, the characters were consistent and interesting. There’s tension, and the sex is an organic function of the plot and the nature of the characters. It all comes together. Every element of this story is working toward the complete goal, and that is a ridiculously good achievement for your first story.

Congratulations. I have only ever read a handful of stories (the last ones being Vix_Giovanni’s Ten Thousand Spoons and maria_mcgeorge’s Lady Carmen’s Fantasy) that were this well put together. Your comments section is a dumpster fire, but this is a really good piece of writing and you should be very proud.

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Well, what can I say. Thank you so much for putting so much time and effort into your review, and taking my story seriously as a piece of art. It means a lot to get feedback from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

Just a quick point. I never actually name my protagonist; Colin is the name of another colleague that Mark likes and interacts with at the party in the flashback scene. Perhaps I didn't make that clear enough in my writing. I deliberately avoided giving my protagonist a name, as I want my readers to be able to step into his shoes and imagine they're playing the part.

Sorry for the late reply. If I'm honest the lackluster response when I first published left me disheartened and I neglected checking my account. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw you actually responded to my review request and I'm absolutely happy with your remarks. You've definitely inspired me to continue writing.

The subject matter might be a joke to some, but I take my writing seriously. I've got a few other ideas that have been developing in my mind for a while.

Once again, thanks very much for the review.

Request for vivisec-- um, review

I'd like to request your thoughts on a recent story of mine. I think there's a problems with it that I'm just not seeing. I'm sure there's more than one problem, but I suspect some sort of overarching problem with the storytelling. I'm interested in the more discrete errors, too, of course. I have some specific things I'm wondering about, but perhaps it would be better not to contaminate your impressions?

The story is Madness of the Hunt, NC/R, 6 pages.

https://www.literotica.com/s/madness-of-the-hunt

Thanks for your consideration.

AwkwardMD said:

I can't believe I didn't mention this, but earlier in the thread there was an amazing example of the allure of straying: Vix_Giovanni's Ten Thousand Spoons. For anyone wanting to write a story about affairs, and getting away with it, and dirty little secrets, take a stroll through that and absorb how she did it.

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Oh wow, thanks so much for the shout out, AMD! And thank you again for your helpful feedback.

I wanted to ask your opinions and analysis of another story, too, but I didn’t want to pile on while you’ve a lot of read requests (and also, tbph, I didn’t want to press my luck after I’d had a good diagnosis lol ) But I would really appreciate your insights, if you have the time! The story is called Parted—the title is a play on the proverb “A fool and his money are soon parted,” but the story is really about a fool who loses everything important because he doesn’t understand that he’s his own worst enemy. Theres an explanatory author’s note before the story.

https://www.literotica.com/s/parted

Thank in advance, Doc!

Madness of the Hunt, by Enchantment_of_Nyx

Link

Buckle up. This one is probably going to generate some conversation.

Madness of the Hunt is a very well-written story. No matter what else I say, hang on to that. You clearly put some love into this, and it shows, but I think your writing talent is masking some disturbing issues underneath.

Starting right at the beginning, I have problems. MotH does not just have the feel of non-con. That first scene, the flashback, that was rape. Flat out. Cara didn’t need to say no, explicitly, to qualify her non-consent because she did so with her actions. She ran away from him because she feared him, and she was right to fear him. His actions retroactively justified her fears. The rest of the sex scenes might fall under roleplay (we’ll get to that), but all it takes is one rape in a story to make it a rapey story.

To be clear, there’s no judgement when I call it a rapey story. I’ve written dark myself (darker, in my opinion). I just mean that you’re fooling yourself if you think this isn’t rape.

***

I didn’t buy the emotions in this story. They felt unearned. I was being told a lot of things about the way they see each other, but I didn’t feel like any of what I was told lined up with how they were treating each other. These two hated each other, and that was never explored. We only ever really saw the result of that hate (violence) rather than seeing the acrimonious back and forth. That would have required a conversation, and at no point in this story did these two characters converse.

There was no emotional payoff. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I bought into the hate these characters expressed for each other at every turn. When everything was said and done, they giggled about wet socks. Tee hee. In a story, the value of a thing can be measured by the consequence. Either Felix treats Cara like this because he really does hate her (and vice versa), in which case giggling about wet socks and the whole denouement is disingenuous, OR Felix’s emotions were shallow and vapid (and vice versa), making his actions along the way extremely distasteful (and vice versa).

This payoff problem appears twice, which is what really makes the story problematic for me. The whitewashed end of the story, after going into so much violence, was one thing, but we all know that part of the story was winking at it being ‘non-con’; the flashback had no such excuse. After actually raping her, those two characters should have had a conversation and it should have been a doozy.

We didn’t get that. From where I’m sitting, I can’t tell if that’s a result of a story that’s not fully thought out OR if you had more in your head that’s just not on the page. Bad intent vs bad execution.

The flashback was the best scene. It should have been the whole story. It had the most authentic emotion, even if it wasn’t well explained, but since you had it in your head as “there was this thing that happened”, it just gets a glossing. Just enough of a retelling to get your point across, and as a result it doesn’t get the emotional treatment that it deserves. Flashbacks are a widely-misused writing tool. They should not be used just to show a scene you don’t otherwise have room for (in this case, because you want to just tell a story about one event (the hunt)). A flashback should serve a purpose.

I mentioned before that these characters hate each other, and I want to make clear that I’m telling you what’s on the page. I can’t tell you what your intention was, but the lengths these characters go to to injure and maim each other (and the planning!) goes beyond sane roleplay. I feel like you knew that, and even had Felix bring it up, but that doesn’t change their actions. Acknowledging it doesn’t make their motivations any better. The words they use are cutting and venomous, but in a way that doesn’t inform their hatred. It’s just mean. The way they dig at each other doesn’t show me why they’re so mad. It just tells me that they hate each other.

***

The vast majority of this story is narration. It’s a lot of telling, and a lot of action. A lot of descriptions, and a lot of lengthy recitations of combat. So many kicks. In an earlier feedback, I made an arbitrary delineation between story and plot. There is a lot of story happening here, but not a lot of plot. Not a lot of point. It isn’t going anywhere that we didn’t see coming from the very beginning. There is certainly a place for stories that just capture a slice of life but in those stories the draw is the authenticity, and that was lacking for me (see above).

Instead MotH exemplified a problem that I see often in non-con stories. Cara is brutalized by her rapist, but it’s okay because her rapist wants her. She gets an orgasm out of it, and he can remotely be categorized as having her well-being in mind, so it’s fine. That’s not empowering, that’s encouraging victims to give their rapists a free pass.

By no means am I suggesting that every non-con story should have a bad end, but the ones that don’t need to justify themselves more rigorously than this.

To me, this felt more like a half-informed rape fantasy. If I insert a lot of head canon into Cara, I can understand her side of it. Cara would have needed to have a conversation to explain “Hey, turns out I really like it like this” and “This is something I shouldn’t want and that makes it even better”, but we don’t get that because these characters don’t talk. I can’t, however, figure out what Felix gets out of it except that he is a rapist underneath it all because he’s a man and that’s what all men want(?), and that completely undermines the happy ending. Rapists escalate, and there’s ample evidence of escalating behavior in this story. That’s a murder waiting to happen, and it’s distracting to have that kind of future hovering on the horizon.

Felix is really only defined by his inability to manage a boner. That’s a villain, and to make him otherwise glorifies the violence and molestation in an unhealthy way.

I think that this problem is glaring here because you usually write serialized non-con. There are expectations in a serialized story, especially on Lit, that probably shouldn’t line up with actual non-consensual sex. On Lit, the expectation is that every chapter will have sex. That means that, with serialized non-con, there has to be a rape in every chapter. In reality, all but the mentally toughest victims would give up after a time or two. They’d stop fighting, and would just be trying to survive, but it’s hard to make that interesting from a literary perspective.

What usually happens is that motivations stop being set up well, or just become cheap excuses. Characters do and say things that serve the plot and allow it to move forward rather than expressing anything that could remotely be described as human behavior. At that point, without significant character growth, everything becomes an excuse to have more rape.

I think that, to a certain extent, your success in the non-con genre and the praise you get from readers, is hurting your ability to write a self-contained, well-thought out story.

***

I did not like the head-hopping. The perspective bouncing back and forth between Cara and Felix felt like a cheap shortcut to get around having them have a conversation to express themselves. I beat that horse to death already so I’ll just leave it at that.

***

I had a hard time figuring out what your intention was with this, so I’m going to recommend three different stories that I think execute different aspects of this story more successfully.

Isolated Property, by AmoryParks, is a masterpiece of short, brutal non-con. It doesn’t pull its punches. It explores the non-con fantasy without pretending she’s not a victim. The rapist isn’t redeemed. The backstory isn’t explored in a flashback, but it is hinted at enough that you can get a real sense of what’s happening. Isolated Property is an example of “I needed to write something really difficult, really fast, to get a thing out of my head,” and I think that was at least part of your motivation with MotH.

Human Resource is a story of mine that explores into the mindset of a woman who enjoys being degraded, and how the shame and guilt weighs on her. Her kinks are analogous to non-con fantasy, but the story stays grounded and authentic to her conflicted emotions without sacrificing on the sex.

Those two stories are mostly there as “If I’m wrong about what you were trying to do”. The one I really think best matches your intentions with MotH is My Black Sheep. It shows complex feelings in a long-standing family relationship strained to the breaking point, with a power balance fantasy thrown in. The entire story is (mostly) one long conversation that progresses, devolves, and explores a fraught past without sacrificing the pacing. It also only shows one perspective and focuses on it, allowing the actions and conversation to fill in the gaps rather than telling. The category (I/T) is a bad fit, but hopefully you can give it a chance.

Thanks! (And questions)

AwkwardMD said:

Link

Buckle up. This one is probably going to generate some conversation...

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First, thank you very much for the time you spent on this and for your insight. You said, "buckle up," but a rough ride is what I was expecting. It's why I asked for your assistance. I could tell something was wrong, and I want to know what it is. If you'll pardon the medical analogy, I didn't ask for exploratory surgery without reason to think the symptoms had a very problematic pathology. I would have been a bit disappointed if you'd read it and told me everything was fine. If everything was fine, I wouldn't be asking. I'm much happier with harsh criticism than with unanswered questions. This isn't the place to come for a pat on the back. I wanted unflinching honesty, you delivered, and I'm grateful for that.

From your review, I can certainly see where the problem lies in general terms. It directly addresses my primary area of concern, which is how well I conveyed what these events meant to these characters. That said, I do have more questions about applying the larger concept of what went wrong to the individual parts. if you have the time and inclination to address them, I'd really appreciate it.

It is a dark story. I don't usually put warnings at the beginning of a story that's already in non-con, but I put one on this one. This story is in many ways, a reaction to the series I'm writing. You mentioned the serialized non-con as a potential cause of the motivation problem in Madness of the Hunt. There is a relationship between the two stories that may be causal to the issue here, but for different reasons than you suspect. The serial has no rape, no violence, and no force. (It is still not wholesome reading.) The relationship is coercive. The male lead is in a position to accomplish something that the female lead cares a great deal about. He makes a deal with her.

In the serial, there is none of the resistance that gets broken down that you point out as being classic of serials in this category. There's no resistance of any type in the beginning, and at no point is there any resistance to sex. She makes a decision, sticks with it, and enjoys the sexual aspect of their relationship. Her resistance comes later in response to things outside of the sexual dynamic. Because she does not want to jeopardize the deal they have, and because she is in somewhat emotionally repressed anyway, she's very tactical, very restrained, and very self-contained.

The lead in the serial is the polar opposite of Cara. I wrote Madness of the Hunt at points when I was stuck while writing the serial, and was frustrated by the vicarious repression I was feeling from writing the lead in the other story. Cara is the embodiment of what the lead in the other story hasn't expressed at this point. Fairly early during the writing, I became conscious of the fact that this was what Cara was. She's meant to be wild, raw, and emotionally motivated to the point of recklessness. She's intelligent and has the ability to govern her emotions, but little inclination to do so. The question I've always had was whether she can be a believable character with that going on. I thought she could, but I knew it was dicey. I can see from your reaction that the answer is that I didn't pull it off. I wonder if it's that I simply didn't do it well enough or if it's that it's not a foundation for a believable character.

Apart from the rapeyness (new word!) of the flashback, the primary diagnosis seems to be that the motivation either wasn't conveyed properly, or that it wasn't one that you felt could explain the actions described. I'm not entirely sure which it was, and since that's at the heart of the problem, I'd like to try to examine it a little more closely if you're willing. I think to do that, I have to start by explaining what the motivations were as I conceptualized them so that you can tell me whether it came across differently, or if the motivation I intended would never adequately explain these intentions. I also wonder Cara is so much of an avatar of undisciplined emotion that she is an incomplete character, and if that could be part of the problem.

With those purposes in mind, I'll explain where I was trying to go, and perhaps you can tell me where you feel it went wrong. I'll start with the flashback scene. That was meant to be ambiguous. It seems that it wasn't ambiguous enough, meaning that I did not present adequate counter-balance to the factors arguing that it was outright rape. What I wanted to convey was a situation that immediately spun out of control, but over the course of the event, subtly shifted from predator/prey to two combatants who are getting a thrill out of it. Cara is equally if not more savage than Felix. The fact that she doesn't prevail isn't intended to make her the victim. The reader reaction I'd intended was to view the flashback incident in much the way Felix does, since he's narrating it: first as non-consent, and then an understanding that Cara was as engaged in it as he was; that the reason she wasn't saying "no" was that she didn't mean "no;" that the struggle was an emotional outlet for her as much as it was for him.

The problem in the flashback seems to start very early on, because you mentioned that she ran because she was afraid of him, and that it turned out that she was right to fear him. Some fear was intended, along the lines of severe misgivings, but I didn't intend for Cara to be terrified of him. She intended to provoke some sort of response, which is why she personally tossed the divorce petition down in front of him. There was no arguing and no pleading, but it's not intended to be because she's too afraid to do that. She runs because that's a pretty big part of how I see Cara. There's a passage that says of Felix, "It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why he was chasing her or what he would do when he caught her. She ran, he pursued. That’s all there was to it." The inverse is intended to be true of Cara. She sees the intent to catch her, so she runs, not because she fears some terrible outcome, but because that's her natural oppositional response. I'm wondering if that was not conveyed properly or if that would never have been convincing, no matter how it was conveyed.

Running, as I saw it through Cara's eyes, started out as, "Uh-oh, now I've done it. I'm going to defy whatever he intends to do next by escaping him." What she feels is far more about defiance than it is about fear. As Felix points out and as Cara's actions over the course of the story demonstrate (or I thought they did!), Cara lacks the fear that some might argue is necessary for self-preservation. That's meant to be her MO outside of the relationship dynamic as well. Felix shares his aggravation and resentment of the way Cara's incautious desire to experience storms left him always in the position of trying to prevent her from falling and breaking her neck or getting struck by lightning. It occurs to me now that all of those illustrations that occur later are not adequate to counterbalance the initial impression the reader gets.

There was one specific thing in close proximity to the flashback incident that I hoped would make it very clear that Cara's motivation wasn't primarily fear and that she was a very active participant. That was the explanation of how the flashback incident became ritualized as the chase/hunt that they resorted to from time to time: "The second time they reached a crisis point, they were in a heated argument when she suddenly stopped, looked him in the eye, and asked him what he was going to do about it. Then she had taken off running. She had known what she was instigating that time." I hoped that this clarified the way Cara saw the initial incident, and to demonstrate her agency. Obviously, it did not. Would more elaboration have helped? Or, was the first impression of the flashback incident too indelible to be shaded by new information or by Cara's perspective?

The fact that Cara's response suggested far more fear that I intended was a mistake. I'm not sure that mistake alone accounts for your view of the flashback. When Felix catches up to Cara in the flashback, I'd intended for the defiance of running from him to transition to the more overtly antagonistic defiance of physically fighting him, because she wanted to fight him. The following lines weren't intended to be Felix's rationalization, but an accurate description of what happened. "The ugly truth was that she had tried to hurt him, and he had been willing to hurt her. In retrospect, he was confident that they both would have drawn the line somewhere, but back then, he couldn’t have picked out where that line would be." Again, I'm not sure whether the problem is that I didn't demonstrate that they would have drawn a line, or if this would never have been believable.

One thing that I am absolutely sure of now is that I failed to convey or perhaps to adequately emphasize the fact that these two characters pull their punches at every turn. Despite being ostensibly engaged in all out warfare, they don't actually do more than superficial damage to each other. The most serious injury is the bite Cara gives Felix (primarily in the flashback, but echoed in the main story line). They're both capable of inflicting far worse. Felix puzzles over why Cara doesn't take any sort of weapon with her even though he's sure she'd enjoy using them on him. The unspoken reason is that she does have the urge to do that, but that she doesn't truly want to. Perhaps the reason shouldn't have remained unspoken.

When Cara takes a whack at Felix with the rebar, she gives him a couple of warning swings before finally landing a glancing blow with little force behind it to his shin. If she had truly been trying to injure him, she would have waited for him to come closer and driven it into a much more vital part, or even just given him a really good whack over the head with it. She used it purely as deterrent. When Felix uses the knife to cut clothes or rope, he warns her to be still, and he does things in a way to minimize the risk that she'll get cut accidentally. He pulls her off the wall of the elevator shaft where she is indeed about to do something highly inadvisable to get free of his grip. If these two had been trying to do each other serious harm, they were being awfully incompetent about it.

So, despite the indications that they were not trying to seriously injury each other, and that Felix tries to keep her from injuring herself (both within the story line and in references to her storm behavior), the opposite seems to have been communicated. I'm unsure if it is because the indications were inadequate to convey what I'd intended, or because there is something in the story that outweighs these indications. or because no indications would ever have been adequate in this situation.

You are not alone, by the way, in not seeing the characters as pulling their punches. Four people read the flashback scene prior to publication. Three read the entire story, and one read the flashback alone. One person who read the entire story was very alarmed by Felix's use of the knife, which I assume to have been informed by an impression of the characters' intentions towards each other that was similar to your own impression. I think that person's view was also that the characters' behavior in general was extraordinary and extreme, and I certainly don't disagree.

You repeatedly mentioned that these two hated each other. I realize that's a comment on what you see on the page, but I need to explain what I intended if I can hope for help figuring out where it went wrong They're not intended to have any abiding hatred of each other. They're intended to be two characters who love each other deeply and even admire each other, but who have some major rage issues that build periodically in their relationship, probably because of passive-aggressive behavior on Felix's part and emotional incontinence on Cara's part. While the story doesn't give a specific timeline, it states that they end up doing this every year or so and that they've done it at least several times. So, this is a relationship they are committed to, and the entire exercise is an effort to work through the blind rage they experience.

What I had hoped to convey was that when Cara and Felix reach a crisis point, they are incapable of backing down until their anger and frustration are fully expressed. Their true feelings towards each other don't change because of the temporary emotional condition, but they have limited access to their more fixed emotions while they are in that state of mind, simply because they are blinded by the intensity of their transitory emotional state. Twice during the story -- once in the beginning and once towards the end -- Felix says that he loves Cara "more than anything." That's intended to be genuine. She doesn't say the same of him until the end because while she's enraged, her other feelings are even less accessible to her than Felix's are to him. Did I simply fail to give the reader enough information to see it this way, or would any amount of explanation have been enough to successfully juxtapose their behavior with the feelings I intended to show?

There is a point in the story reaches critical mass. "Her muffled groan wasn’t enough to satisfy the beast tramping through his mind. It wanted more. It wanted a whole lot more. He looked down at Cara, helpless beneath him. His impossible wife, who he loved more than anything. He slammed the door on the beast in his mind and its dark drive evaporated like mist." You didn't address this directly, perhaps because from your perspective, there never was any actual change. I wondered if it seemed to facile. It's supposed to show an escalation up to a point that enough of the pent-up frustration and anger is expressed that the characters can come back to themselves. It's supposed to be sudden, and I wondered if I failed to dramatize it adequately.

There's part of me that wants to view the problem in terms of the reader interpreting events in the story in conformity with a social rubric and even in conformity with the stereotypical non-con rubric. I think there's some truth in that, but also a lack of functional solution for that explanation. There does seem to be a certain amount of interpreting Cara in line with expectation. You (and I assume at least a fair share of readers) see her as the brutalized victim. I don't. Even though he's the victor of the struggle, she's more bloodthirsty than he is, and she inflicts more damage than he does. She strikes the first blow in the flashback and in the main story line. She is the one who transitioned the flashback incident to a ritualized (and disturbing) method of dealing with their problems. Felix would happily skip it and says so, although it's unclear what he would do in the alternative to address their problems. Until he is truly into the mindset of "the hunt" (courtesy of some stinky swamp mud), he is irritated that he has to be doing this because of their inability to deal with the problems in another way.

Cara is seeking the emotional release as avidly as Felix is, and she understands the need for it better. She's not un-empowered. She clearly could have gotten away from him simply by running out of their designated area. She was near the boundary. She's a distance runner and could have just kept going instead of waiting for him to catch up to her and find her. He's a sprinter who tires and couldn't have caught her. That's pointed out a few times. She had a safe word that he reminds her of. She remains in the situation that she engineered because she has a purpose for being there. She's fully aware that she needs to get it out of her system, and that Felix needs to get it out of his. ("Felix was angry, all right. Maybe not as angry as she was, but he wasn’t as cool and collected as he liked to believe. She, on the other hand, was fully in touch with her rage, and she wanted it answered in kind. Until that veneer of civility was ripped off, there could be no reconciliation. She wanted to tear the mask off his demon, flash her teeth, and engage him on primal, honest terms.") Despite the words on the page, that's not the impression that was conveyed. There must be something counteracting the stated explanation, and I'm not sure what it is.

I think that from the interpretation of Cara as the brutalized victim flows the perception of rationalizations, probably because we expect that from the story's rapist. I think that this is also why the story's ending seems so unsatisfactory to you. If Cara had been experiencing it as you're interpreting it, that ending wasn't possible. I think it may be that you don't see the tension as having been broken, signified by the laughter, because you see what happened as something after which tension couldn't be broken, then or ever.

There's a similar issue regarding why they're so angry. This also flows from the interpretation that they hate each other, which wasn't the intent. To be clear, they experience hate or something close to it in a present-tense emotional sense, but they do not hate each other in the sense of a fixed relationship dynamic. Rage towards each other would be a better description, at least as I imagined it. I think that once hate is assumed, the pure irrationality of the rage is lost. You mentioned that you didn't know why they were angry. The story addresses it in trivial terms (sniping, etc.), but the whole point is that it's trivial. The deeper explanation is given in the beginning: "But ever so often, their relationship took a sudden, bitter turn. There was never any obvious trigger. It was just a shockingly swift decent into caustic animosity. They could both see it happening, but neither of them was able to stop it." That is something that happens to be people. A lot. A whole lot. Yet, I was unable to convey it, and I'm still not sure why.

I do think that part of what's going on is a clash between expectation and what's on the page (separate from the issue of what's intended to be on the page and isn't.) But, it would be a self-defeating cop out to attribute everything to that and to write off the reaction. The social rubric is something I have to take into account. If it leads people to favor an interpretation I didn't intend, even if I have supported the intended interpretation, it means I have to do something more or something else. If I want the reader to realize that this isn't following the well-worn path, I have to signal that somehow. Right now, I'm at a loss as to how to do that. What would have signaled that to you? Without losing the ambiguity that was important to the story, what should I have done to make the reader understand that Cara was not a terrified victim and that this was something in which they equally participated?

You made the comment that we all know the story is "winking" at non-consent (with the exception of the flashback, which you view as indisputably non-consent.) I'm not entirely sure why you feel the story is (or I the writer am) being coy about what it is. If I was attempting a purely non-consent story, I wouldn't need to dress it up to publish it here. All that's required here is that she derive some pleasure from it. That wasn't what I was trying to write, although I'd rather write one that was unapologetically non-con than one that was and was pretending not to be. I don't take issue with where a reader categorizes the story on the rapeyness scale, but what I don't want is a sense of artificiality because it's trying to "pass." It doesn't need to pass, and I'm not sure what causes that impression. I can understand the interpretation of it as non-consent, but I'm not understanding where the facade comes in.

There is one comment you made that perplexes me above all. You said that the flashback is the best scene and should have been the whole story. To me, that's not the story at all. I don't understand why I would want to tell that story, particularly not from the point of view that you saw the flashback. It would be so lacking in complexity that I don't know why anyone would bother. So, for you to feel that the story would be better off limited to that says something about the story as a whole that I am having difficulty unpacking. It was never meant to be more than a premise. The flashback is told entirely from Felix's point of view and the only information about Cara's point of view comes with her vague and cryptic comment afterwards that she "was finally feeling okay again." Even though it's directly related to the main story line, the flashback is not what's being explored.

Although more than half the story is told from his point of view for reasons both choreographic and narrative, this story is an exploration of Cara more than it is of Felix. It's collectively their story, or it could be viewed as Cara's story, but it's not Felix's story. Felix is Cara's natural complement. He's fairly static, less self-aware and less developed. He experiences the shift into his predatory mode, which the reader knew would happen, and he experiences the rapid deescalation when he "shuts the door" on his demon, but that was also anticipated. He doesn't do anything that should be a surprise. He is nearly fully revealed from the beginning. It's Cara's emotions that the reader learns about. It's Cara who surprises the reader at the end (or at least, I thought she did) when it becomes clear that the resolution is exactly what she expected, what she had driven it to, and what she accepted. She instantly knows what has happened when he "slammed the door on the beast in his mind." As soon as that happens, all he does is say her name gently, and "she understood." I hoped her immediate understanding from such a minor signal communicated that she was waiting for that point to be reached and expected it. Maybe that needed a lot more elaboration.

Another thing that did not seem to come across at all is that Cara and Felix need each other. As out of control as the whole story swings, they are each other's balance. I thought it had been shown through actions, but I wonder now if it needed to be reinforced by acknowledgments of the fact in internal dialog.

I don't think I need clarification on the remainder of your points.

I have read Isolated Property and Human Resources. Neither is what I was going for. I will give My Black Sheep a shot. The category doesn't need to be something I like to contain a story I can learn from.

Thanks again for your efforts with this. I regret that it was such an unpleasant experience for you from the perspective of content. It wasn't intended to be. Any additional clarification you can provide on the points I mentioned would be greatly appreciated.

Hi EoN - I hope you don't mind me adding my couple of pennies, since AMD has indicated she's ok with additional opinions. I've just read the story, her critque and your response.

I'm only going to hit some highlights, because there's no point rehashing what AMD wrote, but I may be able to add some perspective given your response.

Overall, I agree that you're a good writer and the story was compelling. It almost scratched an itch for me, but by the end I thought it didn't live up to the promise of the flashback or the set-up. By the time Felix caught Cara, I really expected him to be as ferocious as was described in the flashback. The fact that he wasn't, that he warned her off, wants her to lay still, the fact that he takes as much time as he does to tie her up, and that she chooses to cooperate as much as she does felt off. Disappointing is the word that comes to mind (for whatever that says about my psyche), but also not true to the characters as I understood them.

You write that your intention was to convey that the characters pull their punches as a sign that they truly love each other. But as I was reading the story, I didn't understand why Felix slowed down so much. If the point of the story is for each character to have an emotional catharsis via violence, I didn't see it. Or, better put, I didn't believe it.

Enchantment_of_Nyx said:

The lead in the serial is the polar opposite of Cara... She's meant to be wild, raw, and emotionally motivated to the point of recklessness. She's intelligent and has the ability to govern her emotions, but little inclination to do so. The question I've always had was whether she can be a believable character with that going on. I thought she could, but I knew it was dicey. I can see from your reaction that the answer is that I didn't pull it off. I wonder if it's that I simply didn't do it well enough or if it's that it's not a foundation for a believable character.

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I think a character like that could definitely be believable, and I see bits and pieces of that character in this story. You describe her reckless actions, and Felix's frustration in his belief that he needs to protect her from herself. I think more examples of her reckless statements, or her attempts to incite his temper that lead up to these ritualized "hunts" would fill that in more. When Felix was bemoaning having to coax her in from storms, I wondered why'd he do that in the first place. She's an adult, why not let her suffer the consequences of standing out in the freezing rain?It made me wonder more about him, than it did illuminate anything about her personality.

I'll start with the flashback scene. That was meant to be ambiguous.

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The flashback scene did not seem ambiguous to me either. It seemed like straight up rape. In explaining the aftermath and Felix's aftercare for her, I did begin to understand why she didn't press charges, and even why she glommed onto trying to recreate the events as a planned catharsis. But the event itself read as a rape description. And I don't mean that in a judgmental way either. I will say that I didn't get the impression Cara ran because she was afraid of Felix. I got the impression that she didn't know why she ran either. I don't know how you could have conveyed that, but that was my impression.

Cara is equally if not more savage than Felix. The fact that she doesn't prevail isn't intended to make her the victim.

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There is a lot of detail about the damage Felix does to Cara, and how he does it. There is only passing mention of the damage she does to him, and almost no detail about how she does it. I think even a couple of sentences about her ferocity and a more detailed recollection of him absorbing her blows would clarify this.

There was one specific thing in close proximity to the flashback incident that I hoped would make it very clear that Cara's motivation wasn't primarily fear and that she was a very active participant. That was the explanation of how the flashback incident became ritualized as the chase/hunt that they resorted to from time to time: "The second time they reached a crisis point, they were in a heated argument when she suddenly stopped, looked him in the eye, and asked him what he was going to do about it. Then she had taken off running. She had known what she was instigating that time." I hoped that this clarified the way Cara saw the initial incident, and to demonstrate her agency. Obviously, it did not. Would more elaboration have helped? Or, was the first impression of the flashback incident too indelible to be shaded by new information or by Cara's perspective?

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I think the fact that she chose the 'chase' a second time doesn't erase the possibility that she was afraid the first time. I think if someone read her initial response as fear, the fact that she instigated something similar at some point in the future wouldn't change the feeling that she'd been afraid the first time. Whether that's because the reader's first impression is too indelible, or because people can be very afraid in a situation the first time they face it, and yet put themselves in the same situation again.

One thing that I am absolutely sure of now is that I failed to convey or perhaps to adequately emphasize the fact that these two characters pull their punches at every turn. Despite being ostensibly engaged in all out warfare, they don't actually do more than superficial damage to each other. The most serious injury is the bite Cara gives Felix (primarily in the flashback, but echoed in the main story line). They're both capable of inflicting far worse. Felix puzzles over why Cara doesn't take any sort of weapon with her even though he's sure she'd enjoy using them on him. The unspoken reason is that she does have the urge to do that, but that she doesn't truly want to. Perhaps the reason shouldn't have remained unspoken.

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If I had to say the story had a failing, I'd say that, for me, it's that I didn't buy *why* the characters were pulling their punches. I didn't understand why Cara stayed where she was when she had an hour to get away. I didn't understand why she was batting at him with the rebar instead of either hitting him. I didn't understand why she'd lay back with her shoulders on the ground (emotionally incontinent, but so stubborn she'll keep a promise made under duress?) I didn't understand why Felix moved so methodically once Cara was caught. The whole set up is that they're both so angry with each other that they're in this animalistic, warfare mode. He furious at her for whatever transgressions instigated the crisis, he's thinking about how he's going to make her pay. She's contemptuous of his civilized side and wants to strip that away.

Yes, you have Felix thinking about how much he loves her. But I didn't *see* that. I saw contempt (for her recklessness, for his control issues, for his sense of superiority, for her immaturity), but I didn't see affection other than a respect for her art. And I didn't see any affection from her toward him at all.

They're not intended to have any abiding hatred of each other. They're intended to be two characters who love each other deeply and even admire each other, but who have some major rage issues that build periodically in their relationship

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Not to belabor my point from above, but I didn't see much love or admiration from either character toward the other. I didn't read an anchor for their volatility. Maybe he likes her art? Maybe she likes his novels? Maybe? Without that affection the ending with them strollling naked through the woods together and giggling seemed false.

Did I simply fail to give the reader enough information to see it this way, or would any amount of explanation have been enough to successfully juxtapose their behavior with the feelings I intended to show?

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I think you could have given more information. My initial thought: when we spent time in Cara's head, the reader doesn't get any additional information about why she chose to ritualize the chase/hunt as a coping mechanism. Could you have told her version of the flashback/initial event, and used that to explain her side of the ups and downs of the relationship and the process by which the chase/hunt turned into their coping mechanism? Since she was the instigator, could the explanation have come from her too?

There is a point in the story reaches critical mass. "Her muffled groan wasn’t enough to satisfy the beast tramping through his mind. It wanted more. It wanted a whole lot more. He looked down at Cara, helpless beneath him. His impossible wife, who he loved more than anything. He slammed the door on the beast in his mind and its dark drive evaporated like mist."

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This was actually another turn I didn't understand. His dark drive evaporating simply because he looked down at her didn't follow for me. He's been looking down at her the whole time. He's been fantasizing about punishing her the whole time. Why does he suddenly just not need to?

I wondered if it seemed to facile.

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Yes. Facile is exactly the right word for my reaction to that part. It seemed as though you didn't want to go to the (imo more logical place) of them really hurting each other, so "his dark drive evaporated."

You (and I assume at least a fair share of readers) see her as the brutalized victim. I don't.

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I didn't read her as a victim. But her agency is only sketched at. It's not fully realized. And Felix's actions seem inconsistent.

Even though he's the victor of the struggle, she's more bloodthirsty than he is, and she inflicts more damage than he does.

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That wasn't clear to me.

Felix would happily skip it and says so, although it's unclear what he would do in the alternative to address their problems. Until he is truly into the mindset of "the hunt" (courtesy of some stinky swamp mud), he is irritated that he has to be doing this because of their inability to deal with the problems in another way.

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I didn't get that impression at all. My impression was that he was fully in that mindset from the opening sentence of the story; that he was raring to go and impatient precisely *because* he wanted to hunt her down, fuck her into the ground and punish her for whatever was making him angry. From the jump.

Cara is seeking the emotional release as avidly as Felix is... She's fully aware that she needs to get it out of her system, and that Felix needs to get it out of his.

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I came away from the story thinking that neither of them could have actually gotten the release they wanted. Because they pulled their punches. Because the climax wasn't as frenzied as I would expect it to be, and because the denounment was short. (I think)

What would have signaled that to you? Without losing the ambiguity that was important to the story, what should I have done to make the reader understand that Cara was not a terrified victim and that this was something in which they equally participated?

~snip~

Even though it's directly related to the main story line, the flashback is not what's being explored.

~snip~

Although more than half the story is told from his point of view for reasons both choreographic and narrative, this story is an exploration of Cara more than it is of Felix. It's collectively their story, or it could be viewed as Cara's story, but it's not Felix's story. Felix is Cara's natural complement. He's fairly static, less self-aware and less developed. He experiences the shift into his predatory mode, which the reader knew would happen, and he experiences the rapid deescalation when he "shuts the door" on his demon, but that was also anticipated. He doesn't do anything that should be a surprise. He is nearly fully revealed from the beginning. It's Cara's emotions that the reader learns about. It's Cara who surprises the reader at the end (or at least, I thought she did) when it becomes clear that the resolution is exactly what she expected, what she had driven it to, and what she accepted. She instantly knows what has happened when he "slammed the door on the beast in his mind." As soon as that happens, all he does is say her name gently, and "she understood." I hoped her immediate understanding from such a minor signal communicated that she was waiting for that point to be reached and expected it. Maybe that needed a lot more elaboration.

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Obviously, you had good reasons for telling the story mostly from Felix's POV. But in general I think that showing/telling more about Cara's motivations, her reactions, and her desires, would have helped a lot of these issues.

I'll just add this, overall I enjoyed the story. There are some fairly dark stories in my brain that track along some of these same ideas and I didn't find the story off putting at all. My faults are minor, and my thoughts are offered only for whatever you find their worth to be. You'd written that it seemed like something was off with the story, or you wouldn't have offered it for critque. I hope that some thing I've written will be useful, since my main reaction was different than AMDs.

And the next time I drum up the fortitude to ask her to look at something, please feel free to add your assessment as well (I'm thinking about one...)

BelleCanzuto said:

Hi EoN - I hope you don't mind me adding my couple of pennies, since AMD has indicated she's ok with additional opinions. I've just read the story, her critque and your response...

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Thank you! That was incredibly helpful, especially since you had my specific questions and addressed them from your perspective. I appreciate the thoroughness.

I understand what you meant regarding each point. Some I have ideas about how to address and some I need to puzzle over some more, but I do understand what you were saying about those. I' not sure I'll actually change what's published, just because I don't want to get into the habit of putting up version 2.0s, but I intend to do it as an exercise for myself. I guess I'll make the decision about whether to post the revised version after I'm done.

The combination of your reaction and AMD's reaction makes me wonder if this story is a little too in between. In other words, not hardcore enough for some readers and way too over the top for others. I did struggle with how I could have them act with the passion they had and not actually do serious harm, which is why it's restrained. The problem for me was that if I had been in Cara's position, I'm pretty sure I could have just done him in with the rebar. Once Felix got a hold of her, he could easily have cut her throat, broken her neck, etc. I didn't and still don't know how to free them of restraint without resulting in injuries that would be unacceptable to them and to me (and making for a very short story.)

I can see where I should have done more from Cara's point of view. Because of her chronological entry point in the story, almost everything from her is a present-tense reaction rather than a reflection on specific past events. I'm sure I could have found a way to do that - maybe while he was inside the pulp mill building where he was convinced he'd find Cara. One thing I really feel didn't come through at all was her glee in misdirecting him. She feels he underestimates her, so she enjoyed her little victories to a very unseemly degree. That's how she is in my head, anyway. Obviously, not on the page. It's a shame she didn't get to see him in the mud.

I'm glad Cara's not reading as a helpless victim to all readers. She's not meant to be. I can see how your suggestion of including her thoughts about turning what happened in the flashback into the chase/hunt in which they engage would have helped not only to show how she thought of it, but to illustrate her ownership of the situation.

I'm seeing things I could have done differently when he gets to the critical point where he says 'enough.' I needed to make it more dramatic and show exactly what suddenly changed. The action took a sudden turn, but the staging didn't give the cues. It was just going one direction, then all of a sudden going another, with only a couple of sentences to explain why.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on this. As you said, I knew something was off, and I wanted to pin it down. Not being able to figure something out drives me up the wall. Once I understand a problem, I can either fix it and move on or accept it and move on.

EoN

PS:

BelleCanzuto said:

And the next time I drum up the fortitude to ask her to look at something, please feel free to add your assessment as well (I'm thinking about one...)

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I'll be happy to add my thoughts if you choose to do so. I was relieved to discover that it doesn't hurt as bad as it looks like it would hurt to go under the knife especially since, in my case, I knew it was going to be grim. If you're thinking of bringing the doc repeat business, I guess you must have felt the same.

'Cos I wanna be a paper back writer'.The rest is in the spaces in between.

Enchantment_of_Nyx said:

It is a dark story. I don't usually put warnings at the beginning of a story that's already in non-con, but I put one on this one. This story is in many ways, a reaction to the series I'm writing. You mentioned the serialized non-con as a potential cause of the motivation problem in Madness of the Hunt. There is a relationship between the two stories that may be causal to the issue here, but for different reasons than you suspect. The serial has no rape, no violence, and no force. (It is still not wholesome reading.) The relationship is coercive. The male lead is in a position to accomplish something that the female lead cares a great deal about. He makes a deal with her.

In the serial, there is none of the resistance that gets broken down that you point out as being classic of serials in this category. There's no resistance of any type in the beginning, and at no point is there any resistance to sex. She makes a decision, sticks with it, and enjoys the sexual aspect of their relationship. Her resistance comes later in response to things outside of the sexual dynamic. Because she does not want to jeopardize the deal they have, and because she is in somewhat emotionally repressed anyway, she's very tactical, very restrained, and very self-contained.

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In hindsight, I should not have included your other story while trying to make a point without reading it. It was a bad guess.

The lead in the serial is the polar opposite of Cara. I wrote Madness of the Hunt at points when I was stuck while writing the serial, and was frustrated by the vicarious repression I was feeling from writing the lead in the other story. Cara is the embodiment of what the lead in the other story hasn't expressed at this point. Fairly early during the writing, I became conscious of the fact that this was what Cara was. She's meant to be wild, raw, and emotionally motivated to the point of recklessness. She's intelligent and has the ability to govern her emotions, but little inclination to do so. The question I've always had was whether she can be a believable character with that going on. I thought she could, but I knew it was dicey. I can see from your reaction that the answer is that I didn't pull it off. I wonder if it's that I simply didn't do it well enough or if it's that it's not a foundation for a believable character.

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You are describing a teenager. Someone who hasn't lost that bulletproof mentality, with more willpower than self-preservation. Cara would have made a LOT more sense if she was a hormonal teenager who doesn't see anything wrong with doing a little molly on the weekends. As an adult, with a mortgage, some of us might look back on those carefree days with rose-colored glasses and fantasize, but we don't indulge.

I understand that, within the context of this story, we are talking about fantasy, but to write an adult like this is disingenuous. All of us, as adults, take with us the experiences we gather as teenagers, but there's more to us. I think I would have needed to see Cara being an adult about something, even something trivial and banal, to feel like she was a person with depth and layers and not a badly-written character.

It seems that it wasn't ambiguous enough, meaning that I did not present adequate counter-balance to the factors arguing that it was outright rape. What I wanted to convey was a situation that immediately spun out of control, but over the course of the event, subtly shifted from predator/prey to two combatants who are getting a thrill out of it. Cara is equally if not more savage than Felix.

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It wouldn't have mattered if she was much more savage than Felix because the point of rape is power. Human's aren't built for equality in sex. The only way Cara could have walked away from this encounter on equal footing with Felix is if they'd had a conversation OR if, at the end of it, she flipped Felix onto his stomach, penetrated him against his will, and left him with the risk of pregnancy and raising her child alone on a single income.

I can't understate how much some constructive dialog could have enriched this story.

The fact that she doesn't prevail isn't intended to make her the victim. The reader reaction I'd intended was to view the flashback incident in much the way Felix does, since he's narrating it: first as non-consent, and then an understanding that Cara was as engaged in it as he was; that the reason she wasn't saying "no" was that she didn't mean "no;" that the struggle was an emotional outlet for her as much as it was for him.

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This is dangerous waters. Women who have been mentally incapacitated (roofies, alcohol, etc), don't say no. Not saying "No" is not a substitute for consent, but her actions at the beginning, her fear of Felix, is a substitute for non consent.

The problem in the flashback seems to start very early on, because you mentioned that she ran because she was afraid of him, and that it turned out that she was right to fear him. Some fear was intended, along the lines of severe misgivings, but I didn't intend for Cara to be terrified of him.

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In isolation, this might have made sense. Two characters who challenge each other and throw down gauntlets in a game of oneupmanship? Maybe, but we don't live in a vacuum. Wives run from their husbands because they fear their husbands. Wives who have misgivings about their husbands argue with their husbands. Spousal abuse is real. Splitting hairs about the degree to which Cara mistrusts her husband's intentions does not change the fact that you tried to evoke the feel of spousal abuse without the consequences of spousal abuse.

She intended to provoke some sort of response, which is why she personally tossed the divorce petition down in front of him. There was no arguing and no pleading, but it's not intended to be because she's too afraid to do that. She runs because that's a pretty big part of how I see Cara. There's a passage that says of Felix, "It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why he was chasing her or what he would do when he caught her. She ran, he pursued. That’s all there was to it." The inverse is intended to be true of Cara. She sees the intent to catch her, so she runs, not because she fears some terrible outcome, but because that's her natural oppositional response. I'm wondering if that was not conveyed properly or if that would never have been convincing, no matter how it was conveyed.

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What you are describing here are the actions of animals, like a dog chasing a car. If you want to have your characters act like animals, that's fine, but you lose the ability to have your readers empathize with your characters and run the risk of writing thinly-veiled bestiality.

Running, as I saw it through Cara's eyes, started out as, "Uh-oh, now I've done it. I'm going to defy whatever he intends to do next by escaping him." What she feels is far more about defiance than it is about fear. As Felix points out and as Cara's actions over the course of the story demonstrate (or I thought they did!), Cara lacks the fear that some might argue is necessary for self-preservation. That's meant to be her MO outside of the relationship dynamic as well. Felix shares his aggravation and resentment of the way Cara's incautious desire to experience storms left him always in the position of trying to prevent her from falling and breaking her neck or getting struck by lightning. It occurs to me now that all of those illustrations that occur later are not adequate to counterbalance the initial impression the reader gets.

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I cannot understate how important a first impression is. Since our first take on Felix is that he is a rapist, and all of those later instances of Cara's actions are given to us through Felix's perspective, they are tainted. They look like his version of events (and abusers always have one) rather than the omniscient, unbiased explanations of the author. If this story had been told from Cara's perspective alone, that probably would have significantly changed how everything reads, but this story could not easily be changed to that effect and no amount of enjoyment/orgasms/hugging after the fact would change that the first time was a rape.

There was one specific thing in close proximity to the flashback incident that I hoped would make it very clear that Cara's motivation wasn't primarily fear and that she was a very active participant. That was the explanation of how the flashback incident became ritualized as the chase/hunt that they resorted to from time to time: "The second time they reached a crisis point, they were in a heated argument when she suddenly stopped, looked him in the eye, and asked him what he was going to do about it. Then she had taken off running. She had known what she was instigating that time." I hoped that this clarified the way Cara saw the initial incident, and to demonstrate her agency. Obviously, it did not. Would more elaboration have helped? Or, was the first impression of the flashback incident too indelible to be shaded by new information or by Cara's perspective?

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This only demonstrates her agency as she moves forward in time. It does not retroactively change the balance of power the first time. Since I'm pretty sure that the underlying point we're discussing here is whether or not this is a story with rape in it, then the answer is no.

Nobody is questioning that the bulk of the story, the actual hunt, is only quasi-noncon. It's clearly something she asked for, and that they agreed on, and that there are rules for.

The fact that Cara's response suggested far more fear that I intended was a mistake. I'm not sure that mistake alone accounts for your view of the flashback. When Felix catches up to Cara in the flashback, I'd intended for the defiance of running from him to transition to the more overtly antagonistic defiance of physically fighting him, because she wanted to fight him. The following lines weren't intended to be Felix's rationalization, but an accurate description of what happened. "The ugly truth was that she had tried to hurt him, and he had been willing to hurt her. In retrospect, he was confident that they both would have drawn the line somewhere, but back then, he couldn’t have picked out where that line would be." Again, I'm not sure whether the problem is that I didn't demonstrate that they would have drawn a line, or if this would never have been believable.

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Rape isn't about violence or sex. It's about power. Felix didn't like being threatened with legal (and possibly monetary) repercussions for whatever interpersonal/marital problems existed between them, and so he sought to impose his will on her. That is a dangerous escalation on his part.

The intersection of violence and sexual enjoyment is rough sex, not rape.

One thing that I am absolutely sure of now is that I failed to convey or perhaps to adequately emphasize the fact that these two characters pull their punches at every turn. Despite being ostensibly engaged in all out warfare, they don't actually do more than superficial damage to each other. The most serious injury is the bite Cara gives Felix (primarily in the flashback, but echoed in the main story line). They're both capable of inflicting far worse. Felix puzzles over why Cara doesn't take any sort of weapon with her even though he's sure she'd enjoy using them on him. The unspoken reason is that she does have the urge to do that, but that she doesn't truly want to. Perhaps the reason shouldn't have remained unspoken.

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Showing pulled punches would have been really hard to do in a literary medium, and would maybe have worked better in a visual medium. It would be awkward to try and describe the difference in severity of two different knife cuts without getting extremely technical in terms of length, depth, and blood flow.

The discussion about what weapons the two of them would enjoy inflicting on each other was one of the earliest signs that these two characters harbor hatred for each other. However, I think it's really important to clarify that making Cara dangerous, giving her weapons and tactics, etc, does not make her fair game. She, as a cis woman, is inherently incapable of hurting Felix the way he is capable of hurting her.

When women rape, it's a manipulation game. It's drugs, and bondage, and control. It's age gaps and influence and grooming.

When Cara takes a whack at Felix with the rebar, she gives him a couple of warning swings before finally landing a glancing blow with little force behind it to his shin. If she had truly been trying to injure him, she would have waited for him to come closer and driven it into a much more vital part, or even just given him a really good whack over the head with it. She used it purely as deterrent. When Felix uses the knife to cut clothes or rope, he warns her to be still, and he does things in a way to minimize the risk that she'll get cut accidentally. He pulls her off the wall of the elevator shaft where she is indeed about to do something highly inadvisable to get free of his grip. If these two had been trying to do each other serious harm, they were being awfully incompetent about it.

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My ability to see their actions as incompetent entirely hinges on my opinion of your understanding of weapons combat. Unless I know that you, the author, know how to be absolutely fucking deadly with rebar AND that you have gifted this same knowledge to your characters AND they're still swinging away at shins, then I have to treat serious weapons as serious threats. All it takes is one good hit from rebar to do brain damage or kill, to say nothing of the dangers of knife play.

It seems like, again, you are evoking the trappings of danger without the consequences that should come with them, and that's disingenuous. Nobody watches a movie with it in their minds that they're excited to watch two stunt doubles pretend to hurt each other in the climactic battle scene.

So, despite the indications that they were not trying to seriously injury each other, and that Felix tries to keep her from injuring herself (both within the story line and in references to her storm behavior), the opposite seems to have been communicated. I'm unsure if it is because the indications were inadequate to convey what I'd intended, or because there is something in the story that outweighs these indications. or because no indications would ever have been adequate in this situation.

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Regardless of whether or not you could have, I don't think you should have. This story tries really hard to make the rapist relatable and understandable, and to paint the victim as 'just as bad' and 'asking for it'.

Make no mistake, Felix is a rapist. All it takes is that one time. As Mike Patton of Faith No More once sang, "I am what I've done." I'm not trying to chastise you for writing a rapist, but this is a really important distinction that I think hasn't gotten across (as of writing).

You repeatedly mentioned that these two hated each other. I realize that's a comment on what you see on the page, but I need to explain what I intended if I can hope for help figuring out where it went wrong They're not intended to have any abiding hatred of each other. They're intended to be two characters who love each other deeply and even admire each other, but who have some major rage issues that build periodically in their relationship, probably because of passive-aggressive behavior on Felix's part and emotional incontinence on Cara's part. While the story doesn't give a specific timeline, it states that they end up doing this every year or so and that they've done it at least several times. So, this is a relationship they are committed to, and the entire exercise is an effort to work through the blind rage they experience.

What I had hoped to convey was that when Cara and Felix reach a crisis point, they are incapable of backing down until their anger and frustration are fully expressed. Their true feelings towards each other don't change because of the temporary emotional condition, but they have limited access to their more fixed emotions while they are in that state of mind, simply because they are blinded by the intensity of their transitory emotional state.

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This is theoretically sound but practically untenable. Human memory is not perfect. We are constantly viewing the present and the past through our current emotional states, and those emotional states leave lasting stains on our memories. We are not machines.

You think that what you have done is write two characters who use these hunts as a relief valve. Get it out and get it over with. What I see is two characters using these hunts to revisit grievances, hurling barbed insults that are informed by accumulated frustrations.

Twice during the story -- once in the beginning and once towards the end -- Felix says that he loves Cara "more than anything." That's intended to be genuine. She doesn't say the same of him until the end because while she's enraged, her other feelings are even less accessible to her than Felix's are to him. Did I simply fail to give the reader enough information to see it this way, or would any amount of explanation have been enough to successfully juxtapose their behavior with the feelings I intended to show?

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Rapists say they love their victims all the time. It's extremely common, especially in spousal abuse. That does not undo or re-contextualize violence and sexual assault. Even though I've been preaching for these two to have a conversation, the answer to this question is that actions speak louder than words. Felix's rapist tendencies seem to be fueled by his rage, and his desire to control his wife's behavior. Since he can't do that, and he can't make her listen, he's going to rape her.

There is a point in the story reaches critical mass. "Her muffled groan wasn’t enough to satisfy the beast tramping through his mind. It wanted more. It wanted a whole lot more. He looked down at Cara, helpless beneath him. His impossible wife, who he loved more than anything. He slammed the door on the beast in his mind and its dark drive evaporated like mist." You didn't address this directly, perhaps because from your perspective, there never was any actual change. I wondered if it seemed to facile. It's supposed to show an escalation up to a point that enough of the pent-up frustration and anger is expressed that the characters can come back to themselves. It's supposed to be sudden, and I wondered if I failed to dramatize it adequately.

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In the context of 'the hunt as roleplay', it made sense, but it does not undo Felix's actions in the past. He is already a rapist. This line just means he only has one count of aggravated sexual assault on his hypothetical rap sheet instead of two, and it does nothing to redeem him post hoc.

There's part of me that wants to view the problem in terms of the reader interpreting events in the story in conformity with a social rubric and even in conformity with the stereotypical non-con rubric. I think there's some truth in that, but also a lack of functional solution for that explanation. There does seem to be a certain amount of interpreting Cara in line with expectation. You (and I assume at least a fair share of readers) see her as the brutalized victim. I don't. Even though he's the victor of the struggle, she's more bloodthirsty than he is, and she inflicts more damage than he does. She strikes the first blow in the flashback and in the main story line. She is the one who transitioned the flashback incident to a ritualized (and disturbing) method of dealing with their problems. Felix would happily skip it and says so, although it's unclear what he would do in the alternative to address their problems. Until he is truly into the mindset of "the hunt" (courtesy of some stinky swamp mud), he is irritated that he has to be doing this because of their inability to deal with the problems in another way.

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TL/DR; "Woe is me," Felix said. "I guess I'll have to rape her again now."

This whole passage is an extremely dangerous attempt to equivocate violence with sexual violence. Please meditate on this, and ask yourself why it is that you write non-con. You don't need to provide this answer to me, or justify your motivations as an author, but some soul searching might be in order.

There's a similar issue regarding why they're so angry. This also flows from the interpretation that they hate each other, which wasn't the intent. To be clear, they experience hate or something close to it in a present-tense emotional sense, but they do not hate each other in the sense of a fixed relationship dynamic. Rage towards each other would be a better description, at least as I imagined it.

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This is a hyper-logical understanding of emotions, and these two characters do not strike me as hyper-logical. If anything, this demonstrates where you as the author tipped your hand. You had two characters acting like animals suddenly become cold, rational decision-making machines. When presented with this 180º, the most likely contextual understanding of this was not that you wrote characters capable of two extremes but that there was some kind of unreliable narrator-ness going on. Since actions speak louder than words, the more likely falsehood is their insistence that they are successfully compartmentalizing these urges.

I do think that part of what's going on is a clash between expectation and what's on the page (separate from the issue of what's intended to be on the page and isn't.) But, it would be a self-defeating cop out to attribute everything to that and to write off the reaction. The social rubric is something I have to take into account. If it leads people to favor an interpretation I didn't intend, even if I have supported the intended interpretation, it means I have to do something more or something else. If I want the reader to realize that this isn't following the well-worn path, I have to signal that somehow. Right now, I'm at a loss as to how to do that. What would have signaled that to you? Without losing the ambiguity that was important to the story, what should I have done to make the reader understand that Cara was not a terrified victim and that this was something in which they equally participated?

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Show, don't tell. Show me that Felix cares, and is human and therefore fallable, before you show me that he's also a monster. Show me that Cara understands what she's asking her husband to do to her, repeatedly. Show me that these characters live in a world where what they're doing is wrong, and not just that they're aware of how morally ambiguous that it is.

You made the comment that we all know the story is "winking" at non-consent (with the exception of the flashback, which you view as indisputably non-consent.) I'm not entirely sure why you feel the story is (or I the writer am) being coy about what it is.

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This story is about a sexual adventure that both characters enter into knowingly, with rules and safe words. That is categorically not non-consensual. Period.

There is one comment you made that perplexes me above all. You said that the flashback is the best scene and should have been the whole story. To me, that's not the story at all. I don't understand why I would want to tell that story, particularly not from the point of view that you saw the flashback. It would be so lacking in complexity that I don't know why anyone would bother. So, for you to feel that the story would be better off limited to that says something about the story as a whole that I am having difficulty unpacking. It was never meant to be more than a premise. The flashback is told entirely from Felix's point of view and the only information about Cara's point of view comes with her vague and cryptic comment afterwards that she "was finally feeling okay again." Even though it's directly related to the main story line, the flashback is not what's being explored.

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The answer to this is related to what I said earlier, about having characters that act like animals who magically transform into socialized, mature adults once the cums start coming. It doesn't feel like Felix and Cara experience genuine emotions. It feels like they're lying to themselves and each other.
It's prop emotions and pretend consequences.

The flashback, though, was real. It was genuine. It was gut-wrenching and awful, but it was honest. It was the only part of the story where I really felt like I was seeing who Felix and Cara were, regardless of how they both came to later understand how those events made them feel.

Although more than half the story is told from his point of view for reasons both choreographic and narrative, this story is an exploration of Cara more than it is of Felix. It's collectively their story, or it could be viewed as Cara's story, but it's not Felix's story. Felix is Cara's natural complement. He's fairly static, less self-aware and less developed. He experiences the shift into his predatory mode, which the reader knew would happen, and he experiences the rapid deescalation when he "shuts the door" on his demon, but that was also anticipated. He doesn't do anything that should be a surprise. He is nearly fully revealed from the beginning. It's Cara's emotions that the reader learns about. It's Cara who surprises the reader at the end (or at least, I thought she did) when it becomes clear that the resolution is exactly what she expected, what she had driven it to, and what she accepted. She instantly knows what has happened when he "slammed the door on the beast in his mind." As soon as that happens, all he does is say her name gently, and "she understood." I hoped her immediate understanding from such a minor signal communicated that she was waiting for that point to be reached and expected it. Maybe that needed a lot more elaboration.

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Felix, as Cara's rapist, is not a reliable character witness. I would need to have heard those things from Cara's mouth to take them as seriously as you intended.

Another thing that did not seem to come across at all is that Cara and Felix need each other. As out of control as the whole story swings, they are each other's balance. I thought it had been shown through actions, but I wonder now if it needed to be reinforced by acknowledgments of the fact in internal dialog.

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As I said before, we needed to see these characters as human beings first. Instead, because of the first impression on the page, the way your explanation reads to me is "Every rapist needs a victim," which is equally true.

I don't believe in the idea of true love. Often, when stories try to show this, what I end up seeing is an unhealthy, co-dependent relationship with complementary mania. MotH did not disprove my theory.

"Her recent workouts gave him the idea that she might be heading toward the buildings. Lately, her workouts reminded him of parkour. "Workouts" might not be the right word. She had no patience for disciplined workouts and never used their exercise equipment. Exercise for her was a period of sustained, unstructured, high-energy activity. Recently, he had seen her running along the stone wall that bordered the road in front of their house. As she progressed along the wall, she periodically vaulted back and forth across it, running on one side and then the other. He had also seen her climbing around on the roof of her art studio."

Me, visualizing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VhnU3_-KUY