Oh, hello there! I'm KrimsonRogue and I have a quick question for Onision. How do you do it, Greg!? How did you get this much worse with your new book!? I mean, your first two weren't GOOD by any stretch. But I cannot believe you've gotten this bad in every aspect of writing! Reaper's Creek is the worst book I have ever touched! [Heavy metal intro music plays] [On screen] God is Dead! Part 1: A Reaper's Creek Review. Ash, you have to move. I need to be there. That's my spot, what are you doing? There's cat hair all over my seat now. What have you done? Come on you. Yes, okay. I've finally gotten around to the third book and OH, it is somehow worse. SO much worse than the others. Like, it's to the point where it's kind of confusing how bad it is. There are sections - - there are typos in here where Onision would have had to go out of his way to make them. Autocorrect will automatically capitalize letters after sentences and there are typos in here - - there are sentences that begin with lowercase letters, not out of any kind of stylistic choice that I can decipher... I think he did it either because he turned his autocorrect off, or because his ego is so fragile he couldn't stand to be corrected by a machine. The end result is laughable, of course, and you know where this is going. There are more tabs than ever before! I've seen less color in a night sky on the 4th of July! I went through four different packs of tabs and I still ran out of yellows for all the writing errors. There is a brand new typo on almost every single page and, comically enough, there are more typos than pages in this thing. My god, man! Oh, did you think that the 108 from This is Why I Hate You was bad? Well, you better get ready to triple that almost because I found 316. [A clip plays of Genie from Aladdin dropping his jaw in shock] And I'm hardly a professional editor, I'm sure there are more. I went back through some notes, there was at least two that I found that I missed. So, minimum 316. Now, a lot of those mistakes are just basic grammatical things - a lot of them are with punctuation. He seems to have a thing against using periods. What's the matter, Greg? Are periods an uncomfortable subject? I'm getting hate mail for that one... He uses -- I haven't gone over this in the other books, but he uses comma splices like it's actually a stylistic choice. I don't think he's cognizant of it so I'm still calling it a mistake. It's so bizarre, he uses more commas than Phil Kate Dick and not even correctly! But those aren't all the mistakes that you'll find in this. Aside from the laughably terrible lines and we will go over some of them, don't worry. I also found a number of occasions where he just completely broke tense. The whole thing is presented first person past tense, but every once in a while he'll just break into present tense and I don't know why. Greg put more effort into this cover than he did the actual book. I -- I'm serious, the cover is the best part of this aside from some of the laughs we'll be having but, oh... ...this -- this book is destined for something later. Let's see, nine times that I found that he broke tense and this is funny, there were three times -- back story first. So I've been calling the main characters self inserts for Greg and you could debate that. I think I can have a pretty strong case for it. You -- you can't argue against it in this book because there are three occasions where the main character is called Greg. His name is Daniel in the book, but characters are just like: 'Hi, Greg! How you doing?' Like did insert his own name, and then try to go back and correct some of it? And miss some? I don't know! [On screen] Probably not, because that would suggest he edited the book. Never a good idea. So, this is also one of the more interesting attempts at writing that he has made because... Let's see, Stones for Abigail you had James who was the 'light', you had Arthur... That edgy man was -- was the 'darkness' indeed. Daniel is, according to the opening section here...I'll be generous and call this an introduction -- he says that Daniel is: "Daniel is simply, myself, who I was both good and bad, during the time the story takes place." And of course, he adds: "As you read, I'll leave it up to you to decide what events really happened, and what is a product of creativity." So, I'm gonna call it: now this is 5 percent real life and 95 percent embellished revisionist horseshit. So, it's a story about Daniel. Daniel is an 11 year old boy, living in the middle of... ...somewhere Washington State. He lives with his mom, his two sisters - one of which doesn't always exist - I'll get into that later, and a stepfather. One day Daniel starts having nightmares about aliens -- alien abductions. And it feels so real, it's bizarre. Well, soon after that, he starts developing these strange powers. And before you know it, Daniel can start affecting reality in the most nonspecific way. Like he tries to explain it by saying that he's affecting the coding of the universe, but there's so many questions I still have. The key thing is this book is different than the others because Greg tried creating a magic system. Now, magic systems can be a fantastic way to set yourself apart from other fantasy stories, or what have you. Brandon Sanderson, for example, does a great job at creating all sorts of varying magic systems. Alcatraz Smedry, one of my go-to examples for brilliant creative writing frankly. The main character, it sounds like he has such a stupid power - but, the main character has the ability to inadvertently break things - and that sounds like it would be so dumb, but it genuinely works. And that's because Sanderson understands how the whole setup works and puts the effort in. But, you can have your soft magic system, you can have a hard magic system, broadly speaking. I'll leave some video links in the description, to a great explanation for it. I'm drawing a blank on who actually wrote it, but it's legit stuff, great advice for writers. In fact, go subscribe to that channel it has more advice on writing than I can provide it here. It's such a substantial influence - that I can't recall the name of it right now, I suck... [On screen] The channel is "Hello Future Me". [On screen] Check out the "On Writing" series. [On screen] Sorry for the brainfart! But yeah, this is Onision's superhero fantasy thing and OH -- you thought it went off the rails before?! BUDDY BOY YOU SEEN NOTHING YET. There are also some frankly creepy and disgusting sections, but we will get to it eventually. Let me just show you this real quick... This is from two pages. Pages 103 and 104. Oh, do I have a rant for that! I do hope that everyone has enjoyed my undertaking of the Onision literature challenge. I've managed to complete all three books and I have not gone completely insane. Maybe a touch mad, but I think that's what allowed me to pull through! Take the challenge yourself and see if you can actually survive all three books! Just make sure to hide all the sharp implements before you do, because you WILL want to commit harakiri. You know, it's really sad when you're writing style can be summed up as an overuse of comma splices. He's also really terrible at setting up characters and scenes. The way I like to approach writing like that is I think of it as a movie. You move the camera in, you show it from certain angles, you've got to have that going in your head as you're setting everything up. Try that out, see if that works for you. It's done a lot for me. I am stalling...So we've got this awful awful book, I have 26 pages of notes to go through and I've got plenty of water. I'm also not sure if this is gonna take more than one video. We'll have to see, 'cause I'm gonna go into depth with this one. Also, you like all the new bookcases? You haven't even seen half my collection. I like books! Okay, that's enough jerking myself off. So right off the bat, there is a problem in just the formatting alone. One very subtle touch you can do in creating your books is the use of font and format. It really doesn't show up very often 'cause most people just prefer to type in like, Times New Roman or something like that, even though Cambria is CLEARLY a superior font. No, what Greg decides to do -- is he actually double-spaced everything, despite the fact that he did not do that with his other two books. Now, generally speaking outside of a college essay, there are usually two reasons that you would want to double-space a book like this. The first one is just to make it easier on the eyes, usually for younger audiences - kids books often have a lot of space between them, and that's fine. It makes it easier for them get some into reading. The problem is -- I really sincerely hope, that this was not written with children in mind. And I'm not talking about the gore and the death that we will be seeing... Greg, if this was written for children I will be calling the police on you. The second, and the reason I believe this was double-spaced, was to increase -- artificially increase the size of your book. He did not have enough words to match his other books lengthwise, so he cheated. So the 195 pages I had to go through here, really should have been half that. Oh and uh, once more, I had to number the pages myself. Now, as for the actual content... [On screen] Chapter 1 of 24: Welcome to the Creek. Now the book itself doesn't start out terribly, there's almost a promise of a decent setup here. It's clumsily told, we've got these giant walls of text AGAIN. It's in serious need of editing and formatting, but there is an idea here. You've got Daniel returning from visiting his father in Ohio... He lives in the middle of nowhere with his mom, his two sisters, and a stepdad... It's a really tiny house and out in the middle of nowhere in the woods, and that's fine. Frankly, I think that's a great place to start a story from. You've got very little, and you can use that to expand on your character, and he can be anything after that point. Especially for a young kid like that, that would be a great story to have to show kids that they have limitless potential. I mean, look at how often Dr. Seuss did that kind of thing. Greg...sort of goes with that premise?! He just does it in the WORST way. Oh, I keep -- I want to get into this, there's so much wrong with it. And it's too bad, because I -- I really don't have any notes for the first two pages. It's not that bad, and then you get to like page three and you hit a brick wall with this line: "Maybe we'd just put hang a blanket from the ceiling in our little wooden front room." You know, a great technique when you're writing, especially if you're writing dialogue, but in general - a great technique is to say your lines out loud, so you can catch things like that and you realize that makes no sense. Oh, and just below that we get our first Greg count. It's too bad, I was trying to be hopeful because as JelloApocalypse put it in his Webtoons video, there's something called art evolution. And art evolution is just the natural ability to get better at your artwork, your painting your sculpting, your writing, or whatever the more you do it. Greg has gone backwards! How?! It's like he went out of his way to make it worse! I mean, he tries to make Daniel sound sympathetic and pitiable... Go figure, right? And Daniel tries to talk about how downtrodden he is and how he doesn't really have any friends. "The problem with friends is that they aren't bound to you by blood, there is no promise they will never go away." "Sometimes I feel like my real friends are the woods that surround my house, the creek that runs by it...." "they don't leave me they don't lie to me, they tell me who they are, and they never change." Have you ever been so pathetic that your best friend was a STREAM?! And the character interactions aren't much better. For example, this is the first time we see him interacting with his sister: " 'Hey dork!' belted my sister, who was no longer playing with the geese. 'Oh hi Joanna, -- [ "Oh hi Mark!" ] -- what are you doing?' I said with a smirk. She replied, 'None of your business loser!' " See, this is Greg trying to show a conflicted relationship between Daniel and his middle sister Joanna, the one that counts. But it just comes off so unnaturally. You don't call someone's attention when you want them to leave you alone. Why did Daniel smirk? Why is his sister such a bitch? Then there's also the stepfather. Now, this one's not really a mistake. It's just kind of awkward. But, Daniel calls his stepfather 'Papa' - and that's not wrong, you can do it, it just...sounds weird to me. But I might be the only one who's confounded by that. His stepfather seems to be a pretty stand-up guy all things considered. Kind of a tall, handsome guy, generally described caterpillar of a mustache. "I always admired how healthy he looked because almost everyone else his age looked like they were well on their way to getting diabetes." So yeah, we're six pages in and we're already getting jokes on fat people. Which, you should not be too shocked at this point. You've all been exposed to Onision's writing style if you've watched my other videos. I also skipped over some anti-Christianity stuff in the first few pages against his father, SHOCKER, I know! Now, Daniel living in this kind of environment naturally would go out and play in the woods. That's a good move. That's a good way to set up the the character realistically and you give yourself access to the woods as an environment, and that can be a lot of fun. If you introduce it well. Our introduction to the woods is as follows: "Running up the hill I got hit by countless stickers. Those are plants that basically get stuck to your clothes" -- "by hooking them with their sharp prongs or by otherwise having a natural adhesive on them." "I didn't really worry about the stickers at this point however, it was the nettles I was afraid of." He then goes on to describe how if you boil nettles they make a decent soup. I mean, it's true nettle suck and stickers are kind of bothersome, but otherwise harmless. But, he doesn't do anything with any of that information afterwards. It's like, why introduce that if you're not gonna touch them? You can use that to set the scene, but he...doesn't. And that's really all he does TO set the scene. He doesn't talk about the trees, or bushes, or the wildlife around you - and buddy, I grew up in the woods. The area you are failing to describe was my childhood! YOU'RE ON MY TURF. But that's just what this book is like - you get no character introductions, or introductions that are so bad, that you can't really follow what's going on, or you don't get any feel for the environment the way Greg -- I think is working towards. And there's a bit on the mother, but I want to get on that later. The mom's a special kind of weird. But why am I going over the basic stuff like this early on, when I can just glaze over it and get to the juicy chunks of the plot that don't make sense? Because I want to make a point here. My working theory right now is Greg did not plan ANY of this. I am thoroughly convinced that Greg shot from the hip while he was writing this. He wouldn't plan anything beyond a chapter ahead, MAYBE he had the climax in mind, but chapter by chapter there is so little cohesion. Some chapters are completely irrelevant. Some chapters are really fucking creepy. Like, I'm not even joking...really fucking creepy. And because of that, there is an incredibly choppy pace about the whole thing. Reading this book is basically like watching the first 30 minutes of Mad Max: Fury Road and then you jump into Pride and Prejudice. It feels like it's THAT rough. Anyway, so. We get what I think is supposed to be foreshadowing...? Daniel goes out to play in the woods, when all of a sudden he gets...jumped? "Suddenly I saw the face of my bully show up in front of my eyes. It was Phillip, and immediately after, everything went black." And then he immediately wakes up and there's a small drop of blood dripping down his stomach. I'm not talking like there's a scene cut... It's just immediately the next paragraph he wakes up and there's blood going down his stomach. I think I understand what the attempt here was. I'm gonna be jumping ahead a little bit, so this is gonna be a bit of a spoiler - I hope you don't mind. Think of the dumbest answer of what this foreshadowing -- why he get knocked out, could have been. Okay, 3 2 1 -- you're wrong it was aliens. And I say that speculatively, because it just happens - there's no reason for Phillip to be here, there's no connection. 'Cause Phillip does show up later in the book, but this moment is never brought up again. Jumping ahead a bit, we see that there are aliens who start abducting Daniel and he gets experimented on a little... Sort of. It's very vague. I think this was like first contact with an alien... and the alien shoved something into his stomach or something. Daniel kind of brushes the whole thing off as like, he just got scraped by a stick or punctured by stick or something and just ignores it. But when the aliens do show up later on in the book, this exact moment is never referenced. So it's like why is it here? Anyway, Daniel goes home to try to wash up a little bit because he's just had enough of the outside, when we get this brilliant bit of scene introduction: "Stepping across the wood floor my mom painted white as a result of our pets peeing on our former carpet till it was unbearable to have around," "I walked into the bathroom, now compressing my wound." That is -- there's so much wrong with that. Okay, so what he was trying to do was introduce the fact that he has white floors... white wooden floors -- okay, whatever -- instead of a carpet. But why wouldn't you introduce the floor itself? [Like] 'The floors were white.' I just did a better job setting the scene than he did. Why did he describe a carpet that wasn't there?! I mean, you want to go back and fill in some details to give the house a little more character, that's fine. But this is a terrible way to go about it. Not the least of which is because of the typo or the syntax. I mean God, man, 3 year olds have a better grasp on syntax than you do. Plus, there's the problem of repetition: "I felt like I had enough outdoors for that day, it was time to retire to my bedroom and play video games the rest of the day." If you can avoid using the same word in a sentence or a paragraph, do it. You can use the same word over and over, sometimes it's good for emphasis. And sometimes if it's something innocuous like 'the' or 'a', no one will notice that. But if you use a noun like that... people will notice, and it will sound weird. 'Cause people don't talk like that. Normally. Oh, hold on. I missed this one line. Daniel ran to his sister as he was walking back to the house: "Walking down the hill and into the yard Joanna said with her basic brown teenager haircut and her clothes that were too tight for her plump body type" -- [On screen] So was she speaking through her hair, or her clothes? [On screen] How weird would that look? [Singing hair rendition of I Will Always Love you] [ "Holy shit!" ] You see, word order is very important. It changes the meaning of a sentence dramatically. A fun game to play for the writers out there: take any sentence, doesn't matter what, and insert the word 'only' into it. See how many different sentences you can make with that. And see how DRAMATICALLY different each one of those sentences becomes. Okay, so here's a sentence to start with: 'I said I loved you.' Check that one out for a moment. Chapter 2: The Cold Glass Smack. So, Chapter 2 is pretty much Greg's anti-alcohol chapter. A lot of them could be broken off into very simplistic themes and premises like that. This one, he tries to expand on the neighborhood a little bit and details other members of his family, I guess? Like, he's got grandparents and uncles who live near him, in pretty much the same area, like all within walking distance. So, the entire place kind of feels... [On screen, 'BWAM' sound effect] Incestuous! Greg gave us the green light, "as you read I'll leave it up to you to decide what events really happened." Alright so, headcanon accepted! Daniel's entire valley is inbred. [On screen] You have no one to blame for this but yourself Onision. One of the ways he tries to set it up, is he tries to make everything look as downtrodden as his house is -- -- keep in mind in his house -- I forgot to mention this -- he pretty much sleeps in the boiler room. The boiler/laundry room. He sleeps in what I think was supposed to be a hammock... Yeah. Like, his bed hangs by chains over a water heater, a dryer, and a washer. But apparently the area outside of his house isn't much better. For example, there's this broken-down bridge that children should not be using. "It had boards with giant nails punched through them, the boards weren't quite parallel or consistent in width or length." "The bridge hand rails and support system were made up of metal cables, tiny wires wrapped around one another, slowly rusting over time." "To say the bridge was not appropriate for a child as young as myself, would be an understatement." You know, when I was a kid, and I wanted to go exploring in the woods, we would just use dead trees to cross rivers. Yeah, you've got rusty nails on a bridge. I had loose bark on a rotting tree. Sometimes that would slip out from under your feet and you fall into a river. Deal with it. Also, kids are really stubborn and persistent! That bridge would mean nothing. Okay, and that's the other thing that I need to talk about: getting into your characters heads. One of the harder things to do with writing is properly differentiating your characters, and that includes making them do different things, or speak differently, sometimes they have accents, sometimes they just have different word choices. But ultimately, you have to understand how a character in this position would think. Like Daniel's an 11 year old boy crossing a bridge. More than likely, speaking of someone who at one point WAS an 11 year old boy, you take one look at that and you figure: 'Eh, it's safe enough,' and you cross it! 11 year old boys are kind of dumb. That's okay, I'm allowed to say that! I was one. Greg at no point tries to get into his characters' heads. Daniel is just an extension of himself. I mean, obviously. He doesn't talk the way kids do. And you can set up a story like that, the Umbrella Academy for example... Number Five looks 15, but he's actually -- I don't know, 90? So he's got a reason why talks about doom, and the apocalypse, and all that stuff. And no, that wasn't a spoiler. It's revealed in Episode one. And the reason I bring that up is because of the way that Daniel treats alcohol. An uncle offers a glass of whiskey and everyone around him starts pressuring him to drink. 'Oh, it's just a little sip. Don't worry about it.' And this leads onto the most drawn out rant that I've seen in a while. There's no exaggeration, this goes on for like 2 and a half pages. Pretty much the core concept of this whole chapter is Daniel pointing out that he does not like to drink. "I knew if I was an adult and saw another adult trying to get a kid to drink alcohol, I'd throw him into the creek head first," And that pretty much ruined his night. He went home all alone. So he's by himself in bed, when all of a sudden he hears a "non-audible noise." Which was no doubt, accompanied by invisible scenery. And then... [Sighs] To prove that he is always the best at everything and always will be... Daniel...says this: "In dreams, I can hear things most can't hear, I can see things most can't see." You hear that everyone? Daniel's better at dreaming than you are! This is perfectly absurd! First off, how do you compare that?! How would you possibly MEASURE something that innocuous? Second, are you telling me that Daniel's ego is so fragile, that he has to be better at EVERYTHING no matter how benign it is? 'Oh yeah, you think you're so impressive? I can grow fingernails better than you can!' 'Quick, watch me huff this paint better than you!' It's so bizarre! He doesn't know why he's better at these things than other people. "I have no explanation cognitive abilities in a sleeping state." [Laughs] What?! "I'm smarter than you! Now watch me throw syntax out the window!" [Laughs] That makes no goddamn sense! It is SO beautiful to go out of your way to try to say that you're smarter than other people, and then you write a sentence like that immediately after! Oh my God! No self-awareness. Ugh. Chapter 3: He Had Black Eyes. So, Daniel gets called Greg again. And then we get a moment of Onision's terrible humor. You see, because they're waiting at a bus stop and then the bus explodes only...no it doesn't. "Joanna was screaming in horror from her own wounds as Michelle jolted around spitting up blood and screaming 'Vacation! Vacation now!' " "...I know, I should apologize, that didn't really happen. However, I imagined stuff like that all the time." And then he just plays it straight. It's so bizarre. I kind of want to teach a course on this. So, a very basic formula to tell a joke is the setup and the punchline. Onision managed to screw up both. Like I thought something was actually happening, but... Daniel just pulled the old 'Not!' card on us. Oh boy! One of the least funny jokes from the 90s, great! Oh, but you want to know the real source of the not funny? So we meet...Daniel's friend, I guess. David. Hey, you remember how unfunny Davis was from Stones to Abigail? Well, David's pretty much the same. In fact, he's exactly the same. In fact, his name is only one letter off! For example, this moment when Daniel and David go to high-five each other: "I felt a wet splat on my skin and realized I missed a key moment before we slapped hands," "he had licked his hand as I lifted mine, because David is and always will be disgusting. He's my friend, but he's disgusting." Oh BOY, because we didn't get enough cringe the first time! So yeah, Daniel gets a nightmare about being probed by an alien -- not like that! It's kind of vague, but this is just set up for later, so we'll talk about that in a bit. So, class begins and Daniel gets to see the greatest sight you could when you were in Elementary School: The teacher wheels in a TV and a VHS player. 'Cause it didn't matter WHAT you were watching, it was better than sitting in class. Like, even the educational garbage they played was pretty good. So the movie they're watching is about dinosaurs, and at some point the narrator asks: "What if a human was combined with a dinosaur?" Seems like an odd setup, but okay, I'll go with it. The thing is, the human dinosaur hybrid that they created for the movie was apparently a dead ringer for the alien that abducted Daniel. And he got so freaked out by this, that he just got up and ran out of the room. Seems a little dramatic, but okay. So Daniel waits in the principal's office for the rest of the day, and then he goes and tells his mom about it when he gets home. "My mom was my safety, the only person I thought could protect me," So, I'm gonna take a second to talk about the mom. The mom is probably the most inconsistent character in this book. You see, Daniel speaks VERY highly about her. How she's so important, how she taught him how to fight - just like all the other characters in the other books. And she wakes Daniel up every morning with this cheery 'Good morning, good morning!' kind of a song. But at the same time, Daniel will...I don't know why, just include little tidbits about his mom being kind of neglectful. Like when she was first introduced -- the first time we ever saw her, she was exhausted after work and just collapsed afterwards. And then there's the moment when Daniel went off to the party with the rest of the family in the valley, when he got offered alcohol. And her exact words when the sister asked if she can go to the party were: "I don't care." And she screamed that. And that doesn't even touch how she basically abandons Daniel in the second half of the book. So we've got this conflicted image, do we have this caring mother who dotes on her kids? Or do we have this extremely exhausted, apathetic businesswoman? Like it doesn't even feel like she's a struggling mother trying to provide for her kids - which I think was the intent. The problem is, we only see these two extremes. We don't see any kind of an emotional or physical struggle from the mom, so the image is incomplete. She's either loving and affectionate or exhausted and businesslike. There's nothing in between that. Uh, we also get some confirmation that there is an eldest sister named Christina, but... She's so underutilized, that for a while... I wasn't sure she was real. Like, not imaginary or anything like that. It's just Onision uses Christina so little. I thought that he just stopped writing about her, like all of a sudden she doesn't exist 'cause he forgot about her. It's kinda weird. Anyway, Chapter 4: Hole in the Wall. So in this chapter, Daniel tries to explain who everyone at school is, and tries to set the school up in general and... none of it really means anything. If you're gonna try to expand the world like that, you've gotta do something with it. The school has to mean something. Otherwise, you could just generically say 'Oh, I went to school. It was boring.' And people will probably have a good idea of what you're talking about. If you go into an incredible amount of detail on the school or the characters, then...you've gotta do something with them. Most of these characters do not show up again. Like, the only one who has any meaning in another chapter is Phillip the schoolyard bully. Everyone else, there's like a couple of kids who get introduced... Daniel's interested in a girl named Audrey...Aubrey, sorry. David's introduced to a girl named Mara, and there's another girl named Amber. None of them mean anything in any of the later chapters. Like Daniel asks Aubrey out later on, but it leads to nothing. Like, I guess she rejects him. One of the earlier things that stands out is David's interest in Mara, and oh boy does he come across as a creep. "Daniel began loudly building a plot to somehow get Mara and his lips to connect. David said, 'Hey, dare me to kiss Mara?' to me and I replied 'David, no.' " "he said again more loudly 'I'm going to go over there, and kiss Mara on the lips.' " I mean, he doesn't do it because Mara overhears him but... David's dead to me. I don't care what he does at this point. He is this creepy little asshole. But, it does set a character. See, David now has some definition as a creepy little asshole. What does the book do with this? [ "Nothing! You lose!" ] In fact, in a few chapters David becomes completely irrelevant. This is what I'm talking about when I say that there's no planning between any of the chapters. [ "Good day sir!" ] Ah, but there's also Phillip, like I said, the schoolyard bully. And Daniel tries to come across as empathic and well-meaning, I suppose... But it's internally inconsistent because he gives us -- really two different perspectives between two different paragraphs. He starts by defining Phillip thusly: "He had curly blonde hair, completely random teeth as if God himself had thrown his teeth into his mouth like dice," "shrugged, then walked away leaving them where they fell and as far as Phillip's height, he was about an inch shorter than me." I mean, that was almost a good idea. I was kind of amused by the 'God throwing the teeth into the mouth' randomly. But...Oh, dude. Stop your sentences earlier. However, that critical and insulting worldview contradicts with the empathic side of Daniel in the following paragraph: " 'You know I'm gonna beat you down one day?' he (Phillip) asked, obviously struggling with however his dad or mom treated him at home." So, what? Is he just an ugly bastard, or is he the victim of circumstance? "I wasn't afraid of Phillip, I just felt sorry for him." Didn't you run screaming from a classroom because of a scary alien on TV? And when it's an image of something that you chalked up as a dream, that was absolutely terrifying but this actual tangible bully in front of you, who has said that he wants to beat you up...No! That's nothing. "On my way in I hadn't noticed that Phillip was red-faced and enraged I had ignored him this entire time." Then how did you write about him being red-faced and enraged? "But he was a bully, I had no concern with being a social hero for a bully." What's a social hero? And how does one become a social hero for a bully? And then Daniel begins to project what Philips situation must be. Is his dad screaming at him? His mom's on drugs? The television is only playing static, and poor downtrodden Phillip is such another victim here. I don't know Daniel, this Phillip kid seems pretty serious. You might want to stay away from him. After all, if you're not careful, he might break your arm in a hallway, or shove a baton in your face and break your ankle, or gouge your eye out, or -- One minor point to keep in mind, is that Phillip's name kind of gets inconsistently spelled. Sometimes it's spelled with two L's, sometimes it's one L. Greg, I would've thought you would've paid more attention to that after all, you get a lot of L's yourself. Chapter 5: Face Down Children. So, this chapter we get a little more detail on the creek near Daniel's house. And it's set up, oh, so very naturally: "I looked outside my window, the river running by. I stared, completely losing myself to the effortless flow of water" -- "that would take countless men to move so quickly and smoothly without machinery." We get another scene of Phillip at school, and we get this wonderful sentence: "I didn't want to go out to recess that day, being around Phillip on the playground, especially considering his parents had to pick him up from the office the day prior," "I only imagined how they responded when they were at home, away from the teachers who were ready to call CPS on parents" "then call their own families just to check up and say hi." First off, readier? Second, you were just projecting that Phillip lived in this crap home life. Why would you question calling CPS? Why would you judge the teachers for that? That sounds like they'd be doing him a favour. Also, schools generally don't call families to say hi. That's a little weird. "But I had nothing but pity for Phillip, he's a kid like me, his parents, even his DNA, the results of something less reliable than a coin toss or roll of dice." No 11 year old in the history of humanity ever thought like that about a bully. This is just Onision projecting his own thoughts as an adult into Daniel's mouth to make him sound better. This kind of over moralizing bullshit is the reason why Daniel doesn't sound like a realistic character. No kid talks like this! Well, despite all the sympathy that he's been throwing Phillip's way, Daniel decides to step in and help this other kid who's afraid to go outside for recess. See, this other kid named Aaron feels like he's too small and weak, because Phillip just wants to beat up on him... 'cause Phillip's a bastard. And Daniel decides that, "Well, it's a good thing I'm not small!" "I looked at him (Aaron) silently, I felt lucky I wasn't below average in height, in fact I was above." By the way, I'm skipping about half the cringy ass lines in this book, 'cause I can't fit them all in! Daniel challenges Phillip to a fight. They don't actually fight, so he doesn't get the instant badass mode going - as Onision has done with every other character thus far. The school bell stops the fight before anything really happens. Not for lack of trying, though. Daniel picked up a baseball to use as a weapon, one which apparently just manifested in his hand. There's no setup for this. And then we get this line: "There was about a one in three chance I would actually be able to hit one of them if I tried," "but our human sense of survival regularly demands most of us live in a fashion consumed by fear, regardless of the odds." Onision, if you EVER take a philosophy class PLEASE take me with you. I want to watch you get laughed out of the building. Well that goes completely nowhere, so Daniel and David go back to Daniel's place and they do typical boy things. And then they decide to grab a bow and arrow, and go shoot things in the woods. And just to be absolutely clear, Daniel doesn't want to be like crazy or psychopathic. After all, he says: "I don't want to shoot living stuff, that's psycho." So, what do they do instead? They shoot dead stuff! "Immediately I began plunging arrows into random dead fish in the creek." You know, living or not, there's actually some some work that says an early indicator of serial killers is mutilating animals dead or alive. You're not doing yourself any favors here Onision, your character looks insane. But the fish weren't the only dead things! Because THEN there was a school shooting!!! Actually no, there is no school shooting in this book, but I got you going there for a moment, didn't I? He would've been 3 for 3 if he did that. No, there there's no school shooting. There IS a dead body though. Chapter 6: Bodies in the Creek. Now, the body was of a woman who... This scene sort of comes back later on, but...It doesn't mean anything. I'll get to that later. But after that happens we get a time-skip, I suppose. Because: "David hadn't spoken to me in weeks." And I bring that up because the teacher from the science class on the first day of school, the one with the human dinosaur hybrid video, walks up to Daniel and we get this: "Before class started up again my teacher approached me an whispered an apology" "about the half human half dinosaur she had shown me on the first day of school." It has been weeks, why is Daniel just now getting an apology? I mean his mom said that she was gonna call the school, so what happened? Why the delay? Why is the apology happening just now? That's pretty much ancient news at this point. No consistency or planning anywhere! Well the important thing is -- Daniel tries talking to Aubrey and asks her out. Well, gets rejected the first time, so he asks her again...I guess the next day. When all of a sudden Phillip gets in the way and starts interrupting the conversation. NOW Daniel turns on instant badass mode. "I then sighed and said to Aubrey 'This will just take a moment.' " And yep, he pretty much kicks Phillip's ass all sorts of ways. Really the best comparison I can find is from South Park: [ "C'mon, c'mon!" ] [Punch, smack sound] [Crying, wailing] Phillip was talking this big game and really didn't last that long against Daniel. The fight gets broken up - OF COURSE Daniel won, I don't think he's capable of losing. And the two sort of makeup, doesn't really mean anything... But we actually get something at the end of this chapter that's almost competently written. I'm serious! I'm trying to be genuine here. I'm probably being a little generous, but we actually get an almost decent cliffhanger. You see after Daniel and Philip make up they just kind of get on really casual -- not meaningful conversation or anything, and then we get this line: "That was the last interaction I'd ever have with him before he died weeks later." Now, I love cliffhangers. They're a great way to keep you engaged in the story, they they make you want to keep reading to find out what happens next, and 'you just you can't stop at this chapter, you got to keep going!' And I am almost interested in continuing this because, 'Oh my God, Phillip suddenly died after it looked like he was turning over a new leaf! That's terrible!' I mean, it's mishandled in that I don't really care about these characters. So it's like 'Oh no Philip died. Huh, oh well.' It was so close. The idea is there, the basic format is there. It's not even a terribly constructed sentence. And if it weren't for the MYRIAD of typos, I would think that Onision was actually learning how to write. Chapter 7: The Eyes of Death. I guess there IS some edge in this book. "The creek was becoming the monster of my back yard." Really -- it was, but Daniel, I thought: "Sometimes I feel like my real friends are the woods that surround my house, the creek that runs by it..." "they don't lie to me, they tell me who they are, and they never change." So Phillip apparently went sledding and ended up in a river at one point, and we get perhaps the WORST description of someone dying that I have ever read. "Maybe the current led him to a gathering of logs, and assuming he had not already drowned," "he was sucked under the logs, causing him to rapidly cease existing in the world as we knew it." People don't just die - suddenly they 'rapidly cease existing' I want that to become a thing! So Daniel gets abducted again, and this time it's little different though. Because this time he actually interacts with the alien - he screams at it at one point, then the alien kind of retracts a little bit. It's weird because Daniel makes a comparison -- this alien acts a lot 'You know, this one kid at school...' One kid, who as daniel says in the book, "a special ed kid." And this is where the magic system is sort of introduced... It's weird because it kind of...changes. Like he starts with one, and then just throws that out, and then gets another one entirely. Well, it looks like Daniel actually was abducted somehow. But it was -- apparently he was actually in orbit and "The Earth sat thousands of miles beneath my feet." But it's not like he was abducted completely. Apparently his body was still on Earth. "It was my soul the entire time, and my soul was running home." And that was largely it. There there wasn't much else in that chapter. The thing of note is this one particular sentence I enjoy, where Daniel is considering how he might have been abducted. And get ready for this by the way, it's a doozy. "I don't understand how a creature like that could even bring me to it considering how tiny my room was," "how even more remarkably tiny my bedroom window was and really the only thing that I could imagine was the alien would" "beyond my comprehension break down my physical body, so I could somehow be transported through the very roof over my head." Dear God, man, use a period! Chapter 8: Shook. So this is the chapter where Daniel's powers really start developing for the first time. Daniel meets with David on the playground and they start goofing off. And oh boy, we get this line: "I wasn't sure if he was about to start laughing or 'Psssh haha ha haha!' he burst out, yep, he was laughing." Pure cringe AND a bunch of syntax errors? Nice! After playing for a little bit, Daniel notices a strange red glow way off in the distance. Something's clearly unnatural, he's not sure what it is. So he decides to investigate. But he wants to investigate...very unnaturally, if that makes sense. See, it's not that he could just walk up with David in tow and say 'Hey, I think I see something over there! Let's go check it out.' No, what Daniel tries to do -- is he kicks a soccer ball back and forth with David a little bit, slowly advancing to the school fence in order to get closer to the red glow. Ah, oh, I like this line: "I giggled and said, " 'We have plenty of friends to play with, I have two and you have two, see?' " "Then I wiggled my legs in front of him as if they were separate people." Have you ever been so pathetic that you had to pretend your legs were your friends? Well, they eventually get to the woods and that's when Daniel discovers what the glow actually was. You see, it was...a dead deer. [Crash] [ "D'oh!" ] [ "A deer!" ] [ "A female deer!" ] And then as soon as he found it, the glow stopped. So his superpower is the ability to see dead things for a minute, and then he stops. I mean yeah, I can think of scenarios where that be useful, none of them ever happened. And Onision WILL try to come up with some scenarios. I mean, he doesn't even help the police locating missing people, or missing bodies for murder cases, or anything like that -- that would actually be kind of useful, 'cause then you could put murderers in jail. It's a lot easier to do when you actually have a body to prosecute with. "Or maybe I just had some god-given gift that helped me locate the dead, and it only lasted until I could confirm each location to identify those fallen." I'm not saying that there are not more useless super powers out there, but you've really got a look. [ "Brrrrrrr-ick Frog!" ] [ "Thank you!" ] Well Daniel is so shocked by this whole thing, that he ends up passing out and wakes up in the nurse's office at school. Apparently he has a history of passing out. "Fact is, I had a heart condition, or so I thought I did, but every doctor I went to couldn't identify what the problem was or if there even was a problem." Then how do you know you have a heart condition?! That's kind of an important medical thing to be aware of! What was the problem if it wasn't really a heart condition? That you just passed out every once in a while? That could just be narcolepsy! Oh, and you'll never believe this, but that goes nowhere! He doesn't pass out or anything again the rest of the book, this little topic never shows up again. In fact, a good subtitle for this book would be and 'And nothing became of it!'. Daniel passed out, 'nothing became of it!' Daniel maybe had a heart condition, 'and nothing became of it!' Get used to that phrase. Daniel goes home and decides to start testing this new power of being able to look at dead things. He goes to the creek, where apparently a lot of dead animals are. "Finding these dead creatures felt a lot like easter egg hunting, only the eggs didn't glow like these bodies did," "it was easier than any hunt I had experienced before, and nowhere near as lighthearted." Oh my GOD, that's a morbid comparison. Now, I just want to point out for a later reference that nothing else in this creek glows. It's just the animals. And there's no apparent limits to the range that Daniel can see, like he can see things glowing from way the hell down thataway. I just -- trust me, that will come up again. Oh yeah, and there's this nice big blank page right there! I'm assuming that's in the right place. Chapter 9: Eyes Never Opened. So a friend of Daniel's mom comes over for dinner. She was pregnant. And this is one of the creative ways that Daniel tries to use his power. Now, you may THINK it's a non sequitur, but this actually does have a reason to be in here - as Onision masterfully lays out for us. "But out of my childhood, why would I point out this specific story? The pregnant woman who is a friend of my mom." "I was just talking about discovering dead animals and suddenly I'm talking about a pregnant woman. Well it's not hard to figure out." Yeah, so apparently her baby is stillborn and is already dead inside of her, as terrifying as that sounds. "You see when a woman has a baby that's alive and well inside of her, there would be no reason for me to see any optical illusion or" -- otherwise hallucinate with whatever gift I was given by the alien radiating from any section of her body...yet this woman's belly glowed." The thing that really bothers me is the breaking of the fourth wall right there. I don't understand what kind of a format Onision's going for in this book. It's not like anything else really breaks the fourth wall. I mean, a few times very sparingly, but overall this -- I thought -- was supposed to be, like, a personal self reflection of his lifelong events. Like so many other books. It's just -- first-person, past-tense narrative. But if he's breaking the fourth wall, the who's he supposed to be speaking to? What kind of a layout is he aiming for? Is this like a journal that he's releasing to the public? Is this a memoir that he just wrote years later? You can break the fourth wall in writing, but you gotta be careful about that. I mean, Deadpool's one of my favorite comic heroes - and he breaks the fourth wall ALL the time. But -- but this is so badly conceived. And this is some of the worst foreshadowing. It's like, 'I was just talking about dead things, now I'm talking about pregnant ladies.' -- "Go -- go ahead, try to guess why! I'll give you three guesses, the first two don't count!' Oh my God. I think someone commented it on one of my other Onision videos -- that Onision was an English major or something like that. I don't know if that's true. But if it is, um, Greg...How come you can't use a single writing trope? How come your every attempt at writing is a disaster? So when Deadpool breaks the fourth wall, it's funny. When you do it, it breaks the moment. Because you don't do it frequently enough for it to really be funny. It pulls you away from the story and it looks weird. Oh, and Daniel looks like a GREAT protagonist here when he complains that his spring break is ruined because now he's got to think about a dead baby. And the rest of the chapter is just more whining, until we get to this line: "For me school was becoming more and more lonely every day and even that kid I saved from bullying." Not a complete thought! Well once more we get another alien scene, he plucks out Daniel's eyes... Has anyone ever been able to use the sentence 'Wow, these alien abductions are really getting repetitive.' ? But Daniel wakes up the next morning and all of a sudden his chest is bleeding. And I want to touch on this bit because this is the kind of setting that like -- [Grunts in frustration] Onision does not know how to set a scene. So of course in hearing about Daniel's chest bleeding, they take him to the hospital - but it's introduced thusly: "Immediately my mom ran out, grabbed my papa and before I knew it we were in the urgent care facility" -- "waiting for a doctor to decide if I'm worth his or her time." Now, that right there can work. Except, it continues with this: "I blanked out completely in the truck right there, so much of my life felt unfathomable now." So he sets up the hospital scene then immediately backtracks to the truck. Why introduce the hospital early like that? Especially because, if you want to give Daniel a moment to sit down and reflect... Waiting rooms are a thing! Plus, what kind of a chest wound are we talking about here? It just says that he's bleeding, but it must not be that bad if he's not immediately wheeled into an operating room or something. I mean, are we talking like some sort of a bullet wound, a stab, a paper cut? We have NO idea what his chest wound IS. But it must not have been that bad or that important. "I got to the doctor's examination room after sitting in the waiting room for four hours." "I guess chest bleeding wasn't a huge priority to them." This goes to Daniel's lack of self-awareness. Triage is a thing. If you are in life-threatening condition, doctors will stop what they're doing to try to save your life. If you're sitting in a waiting room for four hours, then your wound is not that bad. I think Onision is just basing this emergency case, or what he wants us to believe is an emergency case, off of this one time where he had to go in for a check-up. They're not comparable. They're different things. But of course the entire family is there. The mom and the one sister are inside, the eldest sister is nowhere to be seen and may not exist at the moment, the stepfather "remained in our truck the entire time we were inside." 4 hour waiting period, plus 30 minutes of waiting for a nurse, plus 15 minutes until you see the doctor so... Bare minimum... We're talking about 4 hours and 45 minutes. Are you telling me that he spent the entirety of almost 5 hours on a truck? If it was the middle of the night and he just wanted to crash there or something, that's fine. Except this started at the beginning of the day! This opened up with Daniel's mother saying "Good morning," doing that obnoxious good morning song she does. But that's not the important part of this scene. The important part is what happens on the drive home. 'Cause some guy in a pickup truck crashes into them really, really bad apparently. So bad, that Daniel notices that the man's girlfriend in the pickup truck was glowing red. [On screen] Correction: She wasn't glowing red, but Daniel could still feel a coldness about her that let him know she was dead. So, yeah. She's dead. And he says "Dude, your girlfriend is dead, worry about her." And that's...how Daniel uses that power. It gets a little modified later on in the book, that -- this ability to sense things... But as far as the whole death thing, I think Onision was attempting to make some sort of a thematic connection with death... About how his existence is always surrounded by death, but again, nothing becomes of it! Oh my God, this is so sporadic and DUMB... Really, the glowing death supervision thing - Daniel never does anything with it. He notices dead things around him, and that's about it. There's another example he tries to give, where he's not even tangentially related to the whole situation. Like when this teacher dies in school from the other side of the building: "Mr. Lucas died right in front of his 5th grade class, and he wasn't even standing up." "Just died in his chair and it took the class around a half hour to notice." Y'all are some dumb kids! [ "She looked like she was sleeping! I'm not so dumb that I can't tell a dead person from a living one!" ] Oh, yeah, Chapter 11: Awake. But it gets really weird when Daniel's mother once more changes character. Daniel starts acting like a brat, so she starts screaming back at him, and he says: " 'So you're gonna hit me! Go ahead and beat me then mom! I don't care! I just want the light to be on!' " 'Cause, you know, he doesn't want the alien abductions anymore. So was the mom Daniel's sole protector or not? Well, something goes wrong, because she suddenly starts screaming. It turns out her eyeballs EXPLODED. I'm not joking. That's what happened. It's kind of hinted, like later on maybe... That Daniel kind of unconsciously did this out of anger. But as soon as he sees his mom in pain, he freaks out, and all of a sudden her eyes grow back inside of her skull. "She was calm and smiled as soon as she realized we were all around her." If that happened to me, I believe my reaction would be... [ " AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!" ] Not Daniel's mother though, Daniel's mother is a STRONG woman apparently. The next day at school, Daniel has a run-in with that special ed kid from before -- do you remember him? The kid is...creepy, and speaks very mysteriously. And it's hinted that the kid was the one who's been abducting Daniel every night. Well, in the next chapter things start getting creepier. Chapter 12: Imposters. The alien kid, as I will prefer to call him, tries invading Daniel's dreams. In true conspiracy theorist fashion, Daniel wraps a bunch of aluminum foil all around his entire body. 'Cause apparently very thin sheets of metal is enough to protect you from the aliens. (No, I'm not kidding. That is canon in this book.) Except when the aliens are still able to enter themselves into your dreams. Some of you may want to jump ahead like 30 seconds, this gets weird. 'Cause Daniel dreams about... 'The most beautiful woman ever'. "Immediately the woman reached down and began touching herself, as she continued to walk across the field towards me." " 'Be with me Daniel.' she said again." [Grossed out] MMMMM. IT GETS WORSE. "Leaning forward our lips connected, as her hands began running up and down my body." AHHH, it's gross. Need I remind you the main character is 11 years old! [ "Hey, read sign! No barfing!" ] UGH. God, this is gross. Well the alien kid is apparently sitting outside of Daniel's bedroom window just looking in, 'cause it wasn't creepy enough beforehand. This is really just an attempt for the alien kid to get Daniel to work with him. And there's another abduction scene with apparently different aliens... And they're doing all sorts of things to like -- take Daniel's body apart. Like they remove his limbs... but he doesn't bleed or anything, and he's conscious for all of it. It's weird. Ohhhhhh my God, this is the one. This is where it gets bad. [Sigh] UGHHHHH. I don't want to read this one. Chapter 13: Julia's Glow. [On screen] Warning! This chapter can accurately be summed up as the 'CP' chapter. [On screen] I refuse to read the more detailed sections, but skip to 1:05:44 to avoid it anyway. This will take you to the next chapter. So, it's summer break and Daniel and his sister have to go out to visit their father in Ohio. And because Onision does not know how to... go beyond certain character archetypes - his dad's a little creepy. "My mom left my Dad because he was accused by her two sisters and her own child of being inappropriate to an illegal extent toward them." Yeah, I can imagine what that is supposed to mean. Because the dad is a Christian pastor in the small church that he leads, 'cause you know, Christians and pedophiles are the same thing apparently. Look, I'm not a Christian and I'M offended. Stephen King gets teased a little bit for using the same character types over and over. The difference is, that man can actually write! Onision just looks lazy. How many of his main character's dads are religious leaders with a history of pedophilia? What the fuck, man?! "Maybe that is why he resorted to religion so strongly, to make sense of his own sins," "to try and accept himself despite what a monster my family members accused him of being." [On screen] If the dad was accused of the obvious here, [On screen] why would Daniel's mother ever let him around her children again? Yeah, so remember guys, pedophiles are bad. Now, let's talk about Julia. Who's 4 years older than Greg -- Daniel. Whatever. Oh, and by the way, sometimes her name gets misspelled. So sometimes it's Julia, sometimes it's Julie. I think Julia is the name that she's supposed to go by, but Onision kept screwing that up - So God only knows what the right answer is. "Julie looked at me with a smile clearly not ready to leave the room so I could shower." "I said 'Well I'm going to hop in.' Julie replied 'Want me to join you?'" Nope. Nope! Nope! NO! [Shouting off camera] Y'all need Jesus! [Putting on rubber gloves] Ugh. [Sigh] And then it gets worse. So, we've finally reached about the halfway point of the book. We have finally reached this page that I told you guys about before. Now, I will not be reading from this particular section because I've scribbled the entire page. Because the entire page deserves to be burned. [Snap] Goddammit, I broke my match bookmark. Now, I've had to think for a long while about how to properly phrase this, because if I don't get the words exactly right, YouTube will probably demonetize this video. [Sigh] So, I've come up with this. Do you all notice how in all of Onision's books, his main character -- it's very important that his main character gets laid? You remember how Daniel's 11? This is -- this is genuinely disgusting, the entire -- and I'm not talking like it's hinted at. There is a full description of an 11 year old -- I will be generous -- MAYBE a 12 year old -- I will -- I will give Onision that benefit of the doubt. 'Cause it's been about a full year and we don't know when his birthday is. So, a 12 year old. With a 16 year old! Full description of what's going on. I was so disgusted. I barely even flip -- I skimmed the page and I got just enough detail to confirm 'Yep. That's happening.' And I'm done. I had to put this book down for several days before I got back to it. And then I picked it up. It happens on the next fucking page! There are 2 instances back-to-back! Which is why -- I have so many tabs. The length of tabs are the amount of the page where this shit is happening. 12 years old! Like I'm -- I'm genuinely angry by this. 'Cause this is... So fucking gross! But hey, you know what? This is my gift to you Internet. You know how Onision loves to accuse other people of being pedophiles, with the SLIMMEST of evidence? You get to immediately throw that back in his face. No matter what he says, every time he accuses someone from now on of being a pedophile, you get to throw this shit back in his face. Oh, yeah, Greg. Sure, Shane made a bad joke a couple of years back. YOU ACTUALLY WROTE CHILD -- [On screen] Censored from the YouTube Police. Now there goes my monetization. Any time that Onison accuses anyone else of being a pedophile, it is IMMEDIATELY invalidated. I shouldn't have to put up trigger warnings like this in a book review. It's fucking gross. The fuck is wrong with you Greg? Why would you do that? 'Cause now it looks like every time you accuse someone else of that, you're projecting. Now, I'm not trying to say that Onision's a pedophile. I have no evidence for that. I have evidence that he's got a sick mind, but that's about it. Don't go accusing him of that. There's no evidence for him and it's basically -- that kind of a tactic on his bullshit level. BUT. You can point out that he has no right to talk or judge other people. UGH God, I'm actually angry now. Fortunately, we don't have to wait very long until we find something that can calm us down. We've got a terrible line at the very beginning of the next chapter. Chapter 14: No More. That's exactly how I feel right now. " 'Excuse me.' a voice came from beyond the darkness created by my own eyes. I opened them." 'Oh no, I can't see! Wait, yes I can.' So Daniel is on a plane going back home, when the alien kid shows up as a reflection in one of the bathroom mirrors. "I could only see the lights surrounding a mirror inside, upon the reflection sat a face, smiling at me." And here's what's weird, because... He leaves the plane, he runs back on, he grabs a fork from one of those push carts for the plane meals and: "Without hesitation I grabbed a fork from the flight attendant food distribution cart and planted it as deep as I could into the neck of the special ed boy." What's going on? Was he a reflection? Was he not? How is this possible? But apparently that was enough to kill him. Yeah, alien kid is actually dead that -- that was -- the fork went through his spine and killed him. Well Onision takes a nap and gets abducted by ANOTHER group of aliens, and freaks out and just starts slaughtering them. Because this is where his powers really come into fruition. So Daniel goes on a killing spree and destroys all the aliens that are experimenting on him. And he has a realization. The alien kid was actually trying to protect him all along. And it's not just that Daniel kills all the aliens on board. Although, apparently, that becomes a little dull: "Killing, like everything else, gets boring after a while. My rage had died, it was too easy." But remember guys, Onision's not a psychopath! He then decides to add insult to injury by blowing up their ship. And he does this by manifesting a bomb in the ship's center. "a bomb that would consume everything within 10,000 yards, and crush it like a can under a cement truck." This just demonstrates that Onision does not know how explosions work. See, you can have explosions in which everything goes out, or implosions where everything goes in. He somehow thinks that a bomb would do both. I mean, there's explosive decompression, but that wouldn't crush everything the way that he thinks it does. But whatever. Chapter 15: God of Black. It's been years since he destroyed the alien ship and they haven't bothered him since. His powers have been slowly developing a little bit -- Oh, yeah, and he's still having sex. And it's not just that he gets laid, because that's -- that's still creepy. Julia becomes 18, so that means that Onision is -- best case scenario -- 16. Wait, I got my math wrong. Uh. Daniel's only 14. Yeah, never mind. I'm not aware of many places where 14 year olds can actually consent. And it's not enough that he's including these sex scenes. He then, of his own volition, throws in the idea that maybe there's mind-control involved - and it gets a little rapey. "Julia is 18 now...and we've gone all the way many times...I never told her to do anything, but the summer that just past," "the moment I desired her, she made herself available to me. She calls me when I miss her, she doesn't when I'm distracted." Now even though he just outright says "I never got her to do anything", 'I never made her do something.' Why would you even bring up the idea? And it's not like he's not able to, because in the next chapter he out and out admits he's been mind-controlling people! Forgive me if I don't immediately believe you that you haven't manipulated your girlfriend. So at this point there are two sex scenes with minors involved, and many more occurrences within this book. So pedophiles are bad...unless they're having sex with Greg's self-insert. Then they're okay. [Sarcastic] Statutory rape? What's that? It's not a big deal. But eventually Daniel gets bothered by the aliens again. One infiltrates his high school, disguised as another student, and apparently wants to out Greg in front of everybody. Now, keep in mind at this point Greg has not revealed his powers to anybody. It's a big secret and the alien has no proof, apparently, that it could actually reveal. And yet Daniel's convinced that he can. "He was going to try to imply that I was a danger to the other students, he was going to try and out me." So Daniel does the natural thing...and kills him. While everyone else is panicking in the school, Daniel decides to lay down and astral projects himself to a waiting alien ship -- just waiting in orbit. But, it's a ruse! "Passing through multiple rooms on the ship I could hear their minds and vocal cords screaming. There was a kitchen, a control station, bathrooms, bedrooms," "everything you would expect on a space station made by humans" -- 'Cause when I think of things like spaceships in Star Trek and Star Wars, the first things I think about are the bathrooms and the bedrooms - not like the holodeck, or the bridge, or the engineering room. "It was beyond obvious these creatures were not here by their own choice." Keep in mind, Daniel warped onto this ship in order to kill everybody, and yet he doesn't -- like, he doesn't even start and realize he's doing something wrong. He just walks around and they're panicking because this guy just suddenly warped onto the ship. This is how badly defined his powers are. So Daniel walks around this ship, noticing that the aliens apparently don't mean him any harm. Yeah, doesn't really go into detail. I'm assuming he reads their minds. When all of a sudden he feels another presence somewhere in the darkness of space! There is another alien ship, this one cloaked with technology that he has never seen before. But, he can detect them all the same. Through space, through this shield, through whatever the ship's made out of. And the ship blows up -- the first alien ship that Daniel is currently on. "My arms, my legs, my upper body...I didn't even notice it was all gone in an instant." Keep in mind, of course, this is an astral projection...so... losing those things means effectively nothing. And with no effort whatsoever, Daniel is able to completely obliterate the other ship. And then we end the chapter with this anticlimax: "I felt a sense of immortality. The world was mine, maybe one day the universe. But I had been up here too long, time to return to class." This is what I mean when I say that his powers are so badly defined. When you create a magic system, you've got to make sure that there are checks and balances in place. Superman for example, is all-powerful. The man could benchpress a planet. But, he's countered not just by a very strong moral compass, but also, Kryptonite and magic. So it makes him a little more well-rounded, as well rounded as a very OP character can - but that's a seperate discussion. In my own work with Micro God, I created a character who could control any aspect of reality within a 5 foot radius of himself. However, he still had plenty of weaknesses. He still needed to eat and sleep, he could not recreate his own energy - and I pointedly stated that in the book. He could only affect things within a 5 foot radius of himself, and anything that he altered that escaped that - would just go back to whatever state it was in. Unless he broke it. And there was some things he just could not fix. He cannot bring dead people back to life. The challenge of Micro God when I wrote it, was to create a blatantly overpowered character, and see if I could still sympathetic and fun. And whether or not I accomplished that is up to you guys as readers. But. Onision has taken Daniel and gone so far beyond reasonable measure As we'll see in the rest of the book, Daniel has no limits, like, at all. He cannot die. Anyone around him that he likes cannot die. At one point Julia gets shot in the head, and her soul is actually escaping this body. Well, it just plops that right back in, and heals her right back up. It makes it so it's not interesting. Nothing can possibly threaten Daniel. So there's no sense of tension, there's no chance that we could feel loss, or consequence, or anything with him. Nothing is permanent, unless Daniel wants it to be. So we cannot, as readers, find ourselves invested in this. The magic system has no definable parameters. He can do whatever the hell he wants, because he can directly affect the coding of the universe. And he does some STUPID stuff with it. It's pretty laughable in a little bit, but... Right now, I'm just reading about an overpowered character thinking 'Oh my God, please just fucking end. I'm bored.' And I'm not the only one saying that, because if you go out and find reviews of this book, his own fans are saying 'Yeah, this kind of sucks.' Chapter 16: Goodbye, Washington. So Daniel decides that he needs to do a little more with his powers. He can't just blow up alien ships and subconsciously force his girlfriend to have sex with him. "There's war, and then there's normal life. In war, you do whatever you can to continue your existence," "but this perversion of reality itself, I don't want it anymore." Do you think Onision has a problem with complete sentences? So he decides to release a few people that he had been mind controlling, including two teachers with very large breasts. " 'Something is about to change' I said. The teacher with larger breasts than most anyone I've seen replied 'What do you mean cutie?' " "and click...just like that, their smiles faded. Both teachers were overcome with an expression of confusion and immediately left the room." And apparently David had also been mind-controlled into being Daniel's friend. "David stood up, looked me in the eyes, lifted his finger and said, 'I don't know what's going on, but I haven't like you since elementary school.' " " 'Stay away from me.' He then proceeded to leaving the room." Oh, but it's not all busty teachers and using mind control to buy friends! After all, there's what's going on with Daniel's family. Because apparently his mom's not doing so well. "She hadn't smiled very much since she left Papa. He drank alcohol a lot, she didn't like his use of illegal drugs either." "At one point he grabbed her and threw her against the wall, screamed at her." "She finally decided to leave him, saying it was to protect us, but from what I recall, he was always nice to us." So this character assassination comes out of bloody nowhere! The last we saw the stepfather y'know, he was being cool with the family and trying to help everything out after the hospital visit. But all of a sudden, no, he's an alcoholic, he beats on the mom, he does illegal drugs. Where did any of this come from?! This is all just some of Onision's latent writing tropes. He has to include 'alcohol is bad, drugs are bad.' I'm starting to think that this all stems from Onision not having any good male role models in his life growing up. I'm not even gonna make fun of that. That's actually really unfortunate. Oh, and then there's the exploding eyeball trope that his mother turns into. "She couldn't get over her eyes exploding all those years ago, reasonably so. She was thinking about me, how I was the one at fault," "and she seems to want nothing to do with me despite the fact I was her own flesh and blood." Now I'm a little confused by this because at no point is Daniel blamed for the exploding eyes thing. There's no proof, there's no evidence that he had anything to do with that. His powers haven't been outed to anybody, like I said. What connection does the mom have to Daniel about this? Keep in mind, of course, that she was smiling when she got her new eyes so... Isn't that a good thing? Is that not positive? [ "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!" ] This sadly becomes the running gag for the mom - for the rest of the book. Every. Single. Time. For the remaining -- however many it is -- 70 pages! Any time the mom is brought up, in any way, it all comes back to 'Oh, mom still hates me because her eyes exploded.' Every time! It's like, thanks Onision, we got it the first time! You know after a while, you've got to stop holding your readers hands. They've got to figure some of this out on their own. If you keep reinforcing this for no reason, it looks like you have no faith in their retention. 'Hi guys, I wrote this book! And I kept saying the same thing over and over because I think you're all idiots!' Well, the only thing left is for Daniel to check in on Julia. And he admits that he has powers to her and she just instantly believes him. Julia, for some reason, likes this and asks to see him. So he flies from Washington State to Ohio somewhere. And we get another sex scene. It's not detailed, but again, 18 and 14. Stop it Onision. Get help. But we get another cliffhanger because: "A bullet passed through my neck and into her forehead." [On screen, dramatic music] I DON'T CARE It doesn't mean anything, you've got God powers. And there's no real character arc in this at all. Daniel learns how to use his powers. That's the extent of his character arc. It's not a matter of the crushing reality of how corrupting total power like that can have. It was 'Hey guys, look at how cool I am!' I mean Micro God wasn't as fleshed out as it could have been because it was a novella, not a full novel. But, a lot of the character arc was how guarded Richard was, and what happened when he let his guard down. [On screen] Want to see more suffering at Onision's writing? Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon!
