To Be A Beta Reader

My first time being a beta reader

Here's the story: Someone I knew since elementary got in touched with me, and offered to read their fics. It was an honour to be a beta reader of their first draft. Listening to them gushing about the things they read fanfictions was heart warming. To preface, they're not going to post this story online, at any time. Even if they did, they won't likely tell me their handle, but would happily lend me their drafts.

The premise

Now, what was the story all about? It's sort of a Boku No Hero Academia fic with a slight crossover with other series. Crossover, per say, as in they perfectly blend in with the anime well. The other anime's timeline aligned with being thousands of years ago in My Hero's universe. Since, they are ninjas and samurais, and whatnot.

What I've observed

It's nothing stellar. Although, that's because I'm not experienced, I just liked the pacing of the first chapter. They detailed it as first chapter other than "Prologue."

Although, their weak point is the lack of expression and describing the scene as it is visually. But, then again, once I've heard their explanation, the writing would cover the entirety of My hero storyline which means... A LOT of chapters and reading. Adding fluff would bloat the fic, it would seem.

A charitable 4000 words a chapter, the first chapter is at estimate of 2000 words. Words? I think likely characters since the first chapter feels so short.

It is riddled with rookie mistake, but I was told they're already at the 15th chapter, and the word count increases. Keeping this in mind, my feedback would be solely on the drafts they've provided and wouldn't school them about it.

Feedback as a Beta Reader on a technical level

The mistake isn't exclusively towards ESL; Native English speaker fall to the same mistakes as fanfic writers. They write paragraphs of what feels like suffocating. They did not do paragraph break -- I made a slight misstep of calling them line break since they seem the same when I write in notepad. Yes. I write in notepad like a barbarian.

There's instances where there's multiple characters talking with quotes being dropped in the middle of the paragraph and I couldn't tell whose who is talking.

This is my first feedback to them. The ones that I left out are their "quirk words." The frequent use of "Suddenly," and "and," everywhere. "Said" is a dialogue tag that I wouldn't mind popping up every now and then. There're too much commas where it should end with a full stop.

Since our exchange was pretty casual, I'll keep it as that. I did point out there are a bunch that needed some fixing with edit. Their response is it's for practice, but they keep in mind of my feedback about the "paragraph breaks".

Story criticism that I forgot to include

I did praise the first chapter to be on point, leaving out unnecessary details. It feels too simplistic. It's an obvious power fantasy for the main character Izuku Midoriya, during kindergarten where he should like, enjoy sticks and watch Cocomelon, he managed to learn ancient arts only the people of old learned but was lost in time.

Overall, I think it's still feel like an honor to have someone trust me enough to read their work. I'm sorry for being vague here. There's likelihood they'll post on AO3 or Fanfiction.Net, in Wattpad even. But, don't expect me to drop their handle for privacy reasons.

This is Rib-Eye Black Dragon writing.

Signing off. 🐲🐲

Peace. 🐲