Talk:The Escape From Pain/@comment-25021327-20161103004957

Okay, sorry it took me so long to get around to reviewing this one. I'm going to try to be as honest as I can be. I can appreciate the amount of work that went into this story, but to be perfectly frank, I don't think it was nearly enough.

There were so many times while reading this that I felt that the boundaries of my suspension of disbelief were pushed far beyond their limits. I understand that this is a story of fiction, but this one (to me) just felt like it had such little basis in reality that I didn;t feel very engaged by the characters, or the world in which they lived.

I think that the inspirations for the characters were good, but the execution felt lacking. To me a lot of the dialogue felt rather wooden, and people reacted in ways that I didn;t understand a lot. Nick says that he hears about "some people working on a cure for cancer," as if this is some kind of incredible thing. Doctors are always working on cures for cancer, why should this be any different? No one suspects that Nick might have been lying or just trying to say something to comfort his father, they just assume that he's crazy and hallucinating? No one just thinks that maybe Nick was mistaken, he's just got psychological problems.

The science and pseudo-science here felt especially tough for me to swallow. I realize that maybe these elements weren;t the main focus of the story, so that they deserve some leniecny in the plausibility department. But still, there were so many things here that I felt just didn;t make any sense. So he can find all the supplies to make a biological 3D printer, okay, I can live with that in a story of fiction, there are some unanswered questions there, but whatever, it's cool. The dude finds a chicken (which was just chilling in an abandoned house that still has electricity... sitting on a bed behind a closed door. was there an open widow, or did the chicken open the door?) He guts the thing and rips its lungs out, which seems a little barbaric for a scientific, doctor type guy. He then creates lung cancer cells, and somehow injects them into the disembodied lung, and they take. Some of these things could work on their own, but all together I just can't let it all slide. I'm not entirely sure how cancer cells would thrive so much in a dead organ. Cancer cells are still living cells, and would probably still need the water, or blood or other nourishment that a living body provides. It's just too hard for me to swallow, I'm sorry.

I feel like things happen here and very little explanation is given. He's some kind of medical student, but he has tons of free time. He has a single final exam that he gets to re-take because everyone just automatically believes that he has multiple personality disorder. I just feel like all the explanations are too convenient.

I won't go on because I feel like I'm just bashing your story now, and I didn;t want to do that. I just feel like this one had an interesting premise, but it fell very short of what that premise deserved in terms of story and characters. I recommend doing some more research when writing something along these lines, I know it's boring, but it can help with the technical stuff a lot. I feel like you're thinking about characters and motivations, and that's great, but I think you need to spend more time with the motivations and explanations for the events of stories.

I'm really sorry to have been so critical of this one, I just felt that it needed so much more than it had. I like the premise, and I really liked the idea of the Pill Crash. I found myself more interested in that than in the cancer story at times. In any case, sorry again that it took me so long to get to this, and I'm sorry for having such negative criticisms.