Review of the Eye of Vyrius by Lilian reads on Fiverr!

 Recently I paid to get my webcomic reviewed by the following seller on Fiverr:

https://www.fiverr.com/lilianreads?source=order_page_details_seller_link

 First off I have to say, I highly recommend her services if you have a webcomic and can afford it! IMO well worth the money I paid her, it gave me very valuable information regarding my webcomic.

 First off, the reason I was interested in doing a review in the first place was finding a thread on the Bad Webcomics Forums, with users badmouthing the comic and saying they were going to do a review back in March this year. While I understand that not all good reviews are valid reviews, especially considering the website is already geared to find only negative things about a webcomic instead of a more nuanced take, taking in the good with the bad, it still got under my skin and got me thinking...

 

Cause like, on the forums, they didn't really elaborate that much, aside from the comic being bad in general, especially the art, and it kinda annoyed me a little, I really wanted to know more, what were the specifics of their criticism? Cause I checked the main website, I couldn't find a review of my webcomic, and it's been like 6 months... So I decided to put the matter into my own hands and request a professional reviewer to critique the comic to know if the comic is really bad or not...

  Especially considering I've always thought the comic was a medicore comic myself for the following reasons...

A: The anatomy of the characters of the art is bad, that much is obvious, though I am improving slightly...

B: The first 25 chapters were wrote without a plan, and introduce too many plot elements as a result. 

C: It's semi-autobiographical with Reizt being a self-insert. And professionals usually warn against this and say there's a good chance they become mary-sues, which I'm afraid of Reizt becoming...

D: And also, because it's semi-autobiographical, a lot of the story feels very random and doesn't flow together cause I wanted to include various parts of my life in it, which are too many to cram into the main story...

 And so, just on the day after the 100th episode of the Eye of Vyrius releasing, she wrote her review and posted to me. Here's the dropbox link if you're interested in reading the review...

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/96w5dmvx12iwxwauv94ha/The-Eye-of-Vyrius-Review_260919_053926.pdf?rlkey=jn7x7gx6412881a5t2bk8fleb&st=86movtnp&dl=0 

 

First off, I was extremely surprised by her overall opinion. She liked it and thought it was a solid comic overall! But she had a lot of criticisms as well, understandable, cause it's a trashfire in a lot of ways...

 

  Come the critique, a lot of what she ended up criticising I saw coming. And the things I didn't see coming I completely agreed with. Again, a lot of story elements were just kind of thrown in there at the start of the story cause I was a dumbass and didn't pre plan it and provide structure, like a proper hero's journey structure or something of the sort. Also especially part 2, where Reizt randomly moves to a new school, throwing away most of the development of the first part abandoning the amulet and the weapons, cause I really, really wanted to tell my story of moving to a new school when I was 10 and fighting against school bullies, while exaggerating a ton. Like it's a fun story on it's own, but it's very, very difficult to make all the parts of the story relevant, without them feeling random.

 Also yeah, the reviewer said Reizt starts to become a bit overpowered in part 2 and is close to a mary sue. I guess when I really think about it, she's right, at least for now... He's good at drawing, he makes a board game at 7 years old, he picks up martial arts really quickly, he's popular, he's morally pure...

Although later on, in part 3 and especially part 4 onwards, I'm planning to have that change, and a lot of people start to take advantage of him, he's essentially becomes a doormat for people, especially bad people, and does a lot of terrible things because of it. He's also kind of stupid and trusting around people, like I was before the age of 30, so yeah, at the very least I have a plan to take care of that. But it's not perfect writing, I agree with her on that, it's a bit too slow for all of Reizt's flaws to really show up. Again, just cause it's based on my childhood memories and it makes sense in real life, it doesn't mean it'll translate well to an actual story. It's the reason why biographical movies and books are so inaccurate to the real life person's history they're about, it's to tell a structurally sound and by extension a good story

Also the point made about a lot of the characters who aren't Reizt being kind of one note and flat. Yeah I agree, there's way too goddamn many of them, and I'm struggling to find ways to make them unique, relevant to the plot and have them get character development. Most stories you're only suppose to have like 4 main characters apparently, but I've got a ton more, and it's hard to come up with speaking styles and making them relevant to the plot without bogging down the main story. A lot of them actually planned to have fairly involved backstories and personalities, but cause of the restraints of the medium (The Eye of Vyrius was originally a video game, video games more effectively allow side plots and characters to shine better than comics or books) I can't include them without having the rest of my life just writing the webcomic and it being like over 9000 chapters. Planning on having only at most 800 - 900 chapters, like 8 parts, so yeah, it would be hard to have many fleshed out side characters.

 I think probably the most valuable information she gave me was the point about the dialogue lacking subtext, like implied stuff, using facial expressions and stuff instead of spoonfeeding information directly. I tried to follow how kids talk in real life, especially basing it on how my nephew used to act when he was 5-10 years of age, they tend to be very direct, but I guess stuff like the narrator dialogue tending to just straight up tell you whats going on in the character's head instead of just leaving it up to the reader to figure out isn't great... 

  One thing which especially surprised me about the review... She liked the actual art! Did not expect that at all, I thought for sure she was gonna trash it, cause of how technically amaturish it was. But she thought they were good character designs and fun to look at! Makes me happy, cause I'm used to people, both online and in real life, saying my art looks crap, so that was definitely a nice surprise! I'm happy about that most of all!

 Other than that, I can't really think of anything else to add to her review... Really good, well worth the $80 AUD! Highly recommended if you're a struggling webcomic artist like me!