OC and Mary Sue reviews and critiques...kinda.

Author's Note.

...well. It's certainly been a while.

I owe all of you an apology. Especially those of you who submitted OCs for me to review.

I'm going to be completely honest with you guys: I'm going to be ending this book. I apologize- again- to everyone who submitted an OC for me to review, but I will only be posting the reviews I've already completed, at least partially.

However, I would also like to take a moment to... encourage some of you? I guess? To kinda take up the torch and- if you're up to it- make something like this yourselves. This isn't just me going "ohhh uh you guys do it i'm bored", I really believe all of you are capable of amazing things. This book came from me reading through lord-knows-how-many different Mary Sue and OC Review blogs on Tumblr, as well as a few here. It started out as just a test, an experiment to see if I had what it took, and... I guess I did.

Keyword: Did.

It's been... gods, nearly a year or so since I last updated? Probably more. And in that time, I've changed quite a bit. I've graduated high school, started identifying as agender/nonbinary, cut off fourteen inches of my hair (and then some), made new friends and lost old ones... it's been a ride. And, looking back, one I wish I shared with all of you. 

Back in... Junior year, I think? I was a completely different person, with wildly different interests. And now... well, I've looked back at everything and, while I'm still up for helping with character development, I've realized that a lot of the things I sort of encouraged and romanticized were... pretty shitty. I'd like to think that I was a decent person in practice, but in the end I encouraged ripping apart characters that were just made for fun, and overthinking every little thing about your OC to the point of almost being scared to publish it. Coming from someone who's always been scared about posting their OCs, it was overall pretty shitty and hypocritical.

Back on track- sorry for rambling- as much as I enjoyed ripping into Mary Sues and helping to review OCs, there had to have been a reason for me to stop, right? Well, aside from me being absolutely terrible about seeing a project to completion (something I'm still working on, sadly), part of it was... well, how much attention this book got. I was expecting twenty or so reads, expecting most people to glance at this before moving on, and for it to fade into obscurity, or maybe have one or two dedicated readers.

Instead, I got an onslaught of notifications and over 5.7 thousand reads.

I cannot thank any of you enough for those, either- and for those of you who had high expectations, I apologize for... well, the entire wait before this.

But, for ~15 year old me, that was completely overwhelming. I didn't know how to handle anywhere near that much attention- I'm still shocked by it, to be honest. People reading my story and enjoying it? Enough to leave it a vote, a comment, and even add it to their library? Nonsense, preposterous. And yet there it was. Right there in Wattpad's gray letters, staring me down whenever I glanced at the book's cover. At the time, it was only about 2k, and that... that was enough to terrify me.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm not thankful for the reads- I am, I promise- but to have my first proper project on this site blow up like it did? I didn't know how to react, or respond.

So I just... didn't. 

I stopped looking at this book, stopped looking at the number of readers that had given it a chance, and stopped writing reviews altogether. I tried coming back a few times, only to be overwhelmed with guilt about how long I'd been gone, and how many people were waiting for a review, and I'd put it off yet again. Honestly, part of me is still worried that people will be upset. However, I feel like you all at least deserve to be told properly that this book is ending, instead of just having radio silence from my end. But the cycle still existed- for months, trying to come back just to put it out of sight, out of mind, until I nearly forgot about it. Just for a new notification showing up in my e-mail to tell me "hey, your book exists and people are reading it!" which should really be a great thing. But, to me, it just made me panic even more, and try running farther away from it. 

Leaving it to... well, technically Adult! aka Current!me to deal with everything. So, what happens now?

Well, as I said earlier, I would love to see some of you try your own hands at doing some character reviews. Feel free to link it in the comments- I'll definitely make sure to check it out! Otherwise... well, my character review days are definitely over. However, I'm still willing to give you a quick overview and maybe a suggestion or two if you're unsure about a part of your character. If you guys are interested enough, I might even make a book with character development tips, or maybe a book where I just... talk about being a writer and character creator in general. I had a plan, when I originally wrote this chapter (before running away... again) of analyzing common character tropes and talking about what really makes a Mary Sue. Tell me what you think in the comments, and this might just get a sister book (maybe with Mari Su's evil twin sister on the cover, too).

Anyways, that's about enough of me rambling. Hopefully this chapter is at least mostly coherent. I'll see you all around the web- in the meantime, remember to stay hydrated. I'll be posting the two-or-three character reviews I had finished right after this chapter.

Your slightly unreliable narrator,

-M(organ)