Story Feedback

[al55]

Hi everyone, just published my first story and would love some feedback.

Here is a link to the story:

https://literotica.com/s/metamorphosis-33

 

[AlinaX]

Hey, congratulations.

Twice near the beginning you have a sentence beginning with 'But' followed by another beginning with 'Though', and in both cases it would be better without the 'But'.

Read the first couple of pages. Not bad, but clearly more care taken in the beginning. I thought maybe both friends would end up abducted and transformed, which imo would be helpful as a story device.

Maybe I'll get around to reading more, but I struggle when the cruelty outweighs the seduction.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Congratulations on publishing. For a first story this was incredibly ambitious in terms of it's length. I liked the basic concept of the transformation and I kept reading until the end. I quite like the idea of a mermaid who can drown. Here are some of the thoughts about it.

1) 40k words and 13 pages is a lot of a story. There's a continual discussion on this forum about how long a story should be and there's no reason a story can't be this long, but for this one I also felt that some sections were rushed, which suggested it might do better as a two or three part story - especially as you'd already split it into acts. One of the things that was noticable was your sex scenes tend to be very short, with the men coming barely a couple of paragraphs after they start. This can be common in these kind of slave stories where the writer is sometimes so keen to introduce a new way to degridate the victim that they don't follow through on the first idea.

2) As AlinaX mentions you've gone for the 'cruelty approach with the story - everyone apart from Sarah is an asshole (okay, one of the other slaves is nice) and no-one will ever help her. For 'slave' stories, some people enjoy this and I'm not going to blame anyone for their fantasies, but it is kind of obvious, once you've worked out that we're in 'asshole-world' nothing is surprising anymore. By the time of the escape it was fairly obvious that the police would be in kahoots and having had the scene with the cheating boyfriend earlier made it a bit easy to guess the end (I mean, this type of story almost always ends with submission, but it could have been hidden more)

3) After having complained about things being too obvious, I think you could have foreshadowed certain others things a bit better. For example, it's revealed during her escape that 'prositutes dressing as mermaids' is a thing on the island. If the girls had seen this during their cruise it might set things up better. Similarly, it's revealed that her sister has a genetic condition - this could have been more effective if mentioned before, rather than after the transformation. A lot of these ideas seems to come up right before they are needed to explain the next plot point rather than being weaved into the narrative a few pages earlier.

4) I know it's a bit weird to complain about some parts of a story not 'ringing true' when the story is about a man who keeps his own personal mermaid, but that's what I'm about to do. Firstly, if I'm a sadistic maniac who has spents years and millions of dollars to turn a woman into the living embodiment of my own personal weird fetish, I'm not going to let other people 'make use of her' first, especially when she isn't 'housetrained' and keeps swearing at me. The end scene where the family/friends lay out how much happier they are, apparently to stranger were needed to go a bit more round the houses to get to the same place - the idea that the
friend won't at least pretend to be sad a death that had been on national television was a bit too in your face. Finally, the escape required people not to believe she's a mermaid, but this seemed forced, especially in the lesbian rape scene. They're only playing with her breasts because if they did anything else, they'd realize she was a real mermaid.

5) Weirdly, there were times when being a mermaid seemed to be the least important thing about Sarah - large portions of the story could be rewritten with her, for example, being in a wheelchair and not needing many changes. She was both a mermaid and a sex slave, and, while the latter is obviously unpleasant, I was surprised that you didn't head in the direction of her starting to enjoy certain aspects of being a mermaid more (maybe that's cliched). I was initially skeptical about the enormous breasts, but felt they kind of worked in the sense of limiting her mobility even more. That said, there seemed to be much more about the breasts that there was about the tail. On that topic...

6) I did wonder exactly how sex with the mermaid works. Okay, so she has a vagina, but this presumably, is facing upwards in the same direction as her navel rather than downwards towards her toes and she can open her legs, so that makes the position the man has to adopt to fuck her different. And a lot of his body is presumably going to be touching her scales - so what do those even feel like. The sex scenes are so short that this isn't really explored. Also, you have a mermaid and you're not making love in water at least sometimes?

7) Robert's fascination with mermaids isn't really ever properly explained apart from 'he always had it'. We also don't get a lot about why he thought Sarah would be the perfect mermaid.

8) We get flashes of Sarah's character but we mostly get either generic expressions of hatred e.g. 'you turned me into a fucking mermaid' type or with her being submissive and biding her time. She's a biochemist which I thought was going to be relevant to the story, but wasn't. She comes alive for the escape a bit, but mostly, while we can pity her, we never really admire or like her. Notably while the other slave girl is nice to her, she's never noticably nice to anyone else (but she doesn't have an opportunity in 'asshole-world'.

 

[al55]

Thank you so much for that feedback! It means a lot did you have any ideas for a sequel?

 

[TheRedChamber]

Thank you so much for that feedback! It means a lot did you have any ideas for a sequel?

Well it's your story, so you should decide where to go next. However, for this kind of thing, I'd probably avoid a direct sequel - the story feels complete and any of the obvious directions you could go feel 'lesser' than the original story e.g.

1) Sarah escapes but for real this time.
2) Sarah likes being a mermaid even though she hated it before.
3) Robert gets another mermaid, but its not so bad for her because Sarah is there etc.

You could potentially continue with mythical transformations - sexy seven foot tall succubus with tail, fauns with goat horns, a 'bull' who is fucking married women becomes a literal minotaur and so on, milk cow, pig sub etc. depending on how much any of those appeal to you (or is it mermaids all the way down?)

 

[AlinaX]

I think there's an interesting challenge in making the story a seduction. How do you write the story so that the reader finds the coercion and transformation erotic when they wouldn't normally?

Twin sisters on a cruise, for example, again. The sisters have a progressive neurological condition and one is already confined to a wheelchair. A billionaire philanthropist offers them a treatment, a special collar they need to wear continuously. He says, "You may keep these for six months as a trial." Six months later, he says, "If you wish to continue with the treatment, then one of you must choose to live with me." The treatment works, and the sister who was in a wheelchair is able to walk again... but there's something else too. The longer they wear the collars, the more in tune they are with what the other is feeling. Even separated by a great distance, each can feel the other's pain and share her pleasure... "The carrot and the stick, my dear. I have given you and your sister life. You can choose whether to live in pleasure, or in pain. Would you rather she felt the bite of my whip, or the thrust of my hard cock between your willing lips?"

But the other fascinating thing about this is, especially if set within contemporary reality, is thinking about how such a transformation might be achieved. It's not really enough to inject someone with a gene therapy and have the body rearrange itself. A combination of retroviral therapy, major surgery, stem-cell-infused hydrogels and bone scaffolds, on the other hand, over a period of weeks if not months... And meanwhile, you could flesh out the mad scientist, draw parallels with Wells's Dr Moreau, perhaps, explore his macabre lusts, his experiments with other transformations, as TheRedChamber suggests. Perhaps the mad scientist is the billionaire's twisted-genius brother.

 

[al55]

Does anyone else have any feedback?

 

[lovecraft68]

I stopped when I got far enough to consider it incel fodder, which is my way of addressing the 'cruelty' others mentioned. Being its EH, more leniency can be given because its supposed to be disturbing, but I'm not a fan of those stories even in horror and in any type as in movie, story, TV etc.. so no point in trying to get through the entire thing.

I'll add the complaint about "But" starting a couple of sentences is more about stylistic presentation than there being anything wrong with it. I start sentences with But...technically you can start them with and, but it seems frowned upon style wise.
But...two sentences starting with the same word, regardless of word, reads as a bit rushed or clunky.

As for ideas to your sequel, I didn't read the entire thing, but it doesn't matter because you're the writer, furthering the story should come from your muse not reader suggestions. Its your story not theirs.