Door 96 - Feb-Mar Community Contest

[Lucius]

@RapeU You're welcome!

[Claire]

I'm a little late for the contest but I wanted to give you some feedback on the story because you wondered in chat why your flash fiction story about Cherry was so well received and this one got less attention. I can not give you a definitive answer and I'm pretty sure that some people will like this story nevertheless, especially if they are only looking for a sexy scenario that hits their personal kink.

Let me begin with what I believe made your flash fiction story work. In flash fiction, I think, you can get away with just creating intrigue. Even if you answer nothing, you can get away with raising a bunch of interesting questions. I commented on your flash fiction story:

if you extend this scene a little, it could serve as a nice opening chapter to a longer story!

And that is why this worked. You essentially wrote an interesting opening chapter to a longer story.

With Door 96 I now have several problems:

1) The slightly surreal, futuristic feel the Door 69 had is gone for me. The story seems firmly rooted in our world, you even date your story by referencing Ghislaine Maxwell. The entire intrigue your Door 69 generated is gone. The world that felt so surreal... is just our world. After reading Door 69 I pictured... I don't know... something like Westworld maybe?

2) Flash fiction can get away with just creating intrigue. Your story gives some answers to the questions raised by Door 69, that's true, but these answers are also completely irrelevant for the story you're telling here. You have world building and setup that has no meaning for anything that happens in the story. What is your story about? What are important themes in your story? My answer would be:

Sadistic woman tortures innocent victim.

There is nothing else going on in the story. All this elaborate human trafficking setup is irrelevant for what your story actually does. If you take all the world building away, have Cherry drag her victim into some basement, lock her up there and maybe just let Cherry say "I'm gonna sell you once I'm done with you, Iris." nothing changes in your story.

You use the contest prompts in a similar fashion to your world building. The entire buildup to Iris' capture feels like it is there solely so you can somehow include the prompts. If you leave the whole capture sequence out, nothing changes. If you started with Cherry opening Door 96 and telling us that Iris is her newest victim, the story would work just as well. Why? Because the events leading up to that moment don't change anything. To me, they feel like they are there so that your story can have a milkshake, a park, and a cleansing reference in them. If I had to guess, I would assume that you didn't write the story around the prompts but that you tried to include the prompts into an idea you already had.


3) I think this final point is the most important one and it actually informs the second point to a degree: There is no narrative tension in your story.

Cherry early on gets an assignment (with a time limit even). She completes that assignment without trouble and with massive time to spare (which is essentially Chekhov's gun not firing in your story). Then during the actual assault, there is also no obstacle to overcome. You wrote a story that has no central conflict with a protagonist that has no character arc. Naturally, your story now can only appeal to those who are into sadistic lesbian noncon devoid of actual storytelling.

If you compare that to your more popular stories you can easily see the difference. The CUNT Rapist, the Wendy and Hannah stories, Scars for the Gang Rape Galore contest: They all have characters that are more than "sadistic lesbian" and narrative conflicts that inform the story, even if it is as simple as "Will the girls escape?" in Scars. If you read Scars for the first time you genuinely wonder whether the girls will make it out or not. Same in The Blowout. In The Cunt Rapist you wonder on a macro level how bad thingswill get for Alex, whether she will find a stopping point, and on a micro level you wonder whether she will succeed with victim number x or not. Here, in Door 96, at no point does the reader think that anything is at stake. at o point did I think that Cherry might fail or change as a person. At no point did I think that Iris might escape or turn the tables on Cherry. Nothing changes, nothing is at stake, and therefore the story has no tension.



All of that being said, this critique is heavily filtered through a storytelling perspective. Some might enjoy the story simply because they find noncon lesbian sadism hot. Maybe someone like @AdmiralPiet would enjoy the world building as an aspect in and of itself regardless of its function for the narrative. But I truly think: If you look at the stories you wrote that got the most success here, then they always have narrative tension, conflict and fleshed out characters. They are never just "sadistic character does sadistic things without encountering obstacles to overcome".

[RapeU]

Thank you @Claire. That is the final missing piece I needed to understand what was fully different about Cherry flash fiction vs Cherry short story. Flash fiction in general can get away with things not fully planned out, mysterious unanswered questions, and a loose plot without a plan to close it. Longer stories in general cannot.

Old habits are hard to break. With my older stories, I wrote first without a specific plan on where the story went next and figured out the plot as I went along. The resulting #KCU is a mess of complex plot twists and continuity errors. Though, there's less continuity errors after a full rewrite, but it still lacks character development. Another rewrite is needed, but probably won't be done for a while.

Hannah and Wendy worked so well because I took the time to generate a skeleton of a plot like I did with The CUNT Rapist instead of throwing random junk in a mold and hoping to create something. Unlike this story and the #KCU, I had some semblance of a plot mapped out first and a general idea of who the characters would be. Car accident - house - house is a trap - escape attempt - true escape - rescue. Even though the ending was abrupt at the time (and now fixed) I had enough of a skeleton to create something unique, even with the now fixed ending. With this story? I fell into the same old habit of having absolutely no plot plan whatsoever beyond "abduct and rape" and just winged it. Works sometimes for flash fiction, doesn't work for longer stories.