I generally don't read AARs these days (well, except for Guess the Author, as these smaller stories that don't require a large time investment are just my cup of tea), so my guesses concerning the authors will be based on AARland 2004 or so and thus wildly out of date, but that won't prevent me from commenting the entries:
------------
#1. Ok, I admit it - this one is right up my lane. Wacky, well-written, and with a couple of unexpected twists. That said, it is a bit too rambling and there are a few too many lose threads referring to other people, incidents, or background story. Don't get me wrong - I
do like that sort of thing in moderation and am a great lover of Simon R. Green's and Glen Cook's works which this likely draws on (if it isn't drawing on the John Taylor P.I. and/or Garret P.I. stories, it is drawing on something awfully similar), but losing a third of the length by condensing the loose threads and sharpening up the language would do the entry good. Moreover, most of the characters have little depth and less characterization. That's to some degree acceptable considering the focus and type of story (people introduced briefly just to be killed off as a sideshow)... but at least the main character and the Fatecaller could have gotten better physical descriptions. I'm not asking for a premature disclosure of just exactly which type of creature our hero is (though once revealed a couple of early comments made more sense) – some sort of description of what he looked like to the other guards would not have been amiss.
GUESS: Somebody who likes Simon R. Green's and Glen Cook's books and is an experienced writer. Unfortunately, that covers quite a number of those whose works I remember. Wyvern could have written this, but I don't think he's written any AARs since we did MP AARs together some years back, Lord Durham and several Free Company chappies are/were obviously also Black Company aficionados, but I have no idea how that's going these days, and this isn't LD's normal writing style, that's for sure. I give up.
-- That said, if the reader doesn't know the stories I'm talking about, you owe it to yourself to try them out. Get the first few books of Simon R. Green's ”Nightside” series or something like ”Blue Moon Rising” (for slightly more normal fantasy) and the first few books of Glen Cook's ”Black Company” series or (what is possibly his masterpiece) ”Tower of Fear”, and, if you like them, get everything else the writers have ever written, which is a pretty big corpus by now.
------------
#2. Two knights, a squire, the lady who is the daughter of the lord and the object of the knights' desires... and utterly unremarkable.
I feel like a bastard saying that since the writing itself is good and completely on-topic (unlike #1), but how often have we seen the "two good men and true, as brothers to eachother &etc, fighting over a lady - and THEN, SURPRISE, the best one of them (undefeated champion! RAH!) decides, like a really soppy manly man putting somebody else's desires above his own, to lose because he belives the other guy is most worthy/most loved by the lady &etc&etc&etc" story? Much too often, that's how often.
Everybody feels entirely one-dimensional for the brief period of time we know them and not even the ending - the lady showing up to ask just what is going on - saves it.
Now, if the story had left Sir Arthur dead on the ground with Luke crying over his body, Sir James rashly vowing to take holy vows in penance OR happily forgetting his friend since he'll get the tail he's after and, who knows, perhaps the lordship too in time?, and the Lady Kathleen disconsolate (for she really did love Sir Arthur better, or convinces herself of that after his death),
then you have a plot twist worthy of ending the story with a bang, not a whimper. (Ok, this might be overdoing it more than a bit, but you see what I mean?
)
A couple of words of advice: Men at arms don't have to be
grizzled. Squires don't have to speak in
gruff voices. Duels don't have to take place in
hushed silence (before combat) and
stunned silence (when something unexpected happens), everybody else present do not need to act in unison while referred to as
the crowd - and so on and so forth. Yes, many of these phrases are used all the time in knights' tales, but using stock phrases can definitely be overdone.
I know it is hard, particularly for non-native speakers of the English language and particularly when the story itself is stylized, but the language is so rich that it is a crime not to experiment a bit.
If you don't feel safe enough to experiment, stealing directly from Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur would be another option - it has god knows how many variants of "and he smote him to the ground, man and horse" plus other useful phrases for knights pounding eachother or speaking to underlings.
GUESS: The style doesn't really match any I recall back from 2003-2004 (sorry). At a guess, the author is a non-native speaker of the English language who has written a few AARs and is comfortable with writing in English in general but not yet comfortable enough to experiment.
------------
#3. I've forgotten the movie mostly so I do not know whether these two guys were in it or invented for the purpose, but who cares? We've got two Jedis going all out in mortal combat with a high degree of intensity and well choregraphed moves: a hero and a villain fighting their private fight against the backdrop of an active battlefield. The story itself evidences approximately zero originality – it goes entirely according to script: dead master, older student (evil) versus younger student (good), superhuman efforts, and the fight ends inconclusively when the good appears to be almost defeated (but not quite!) and outside forces intervene in a way that will undoubtedly have the hero surviving while leaving the fate of the villain uncertain, setting up the scene for a return engagement (because if there's one thing that is certain about villains, whose fate is uncertain, it is that they'll be back for an encore). Let's face it – it is a quite decent representative of the type of pulp space opera fanfic that the major SF movie franchises attract. Good work.
That said, the writer desperately needs to find alternate ways to refer to the duelists. Having almost every single sentence include ”Thrama” or ”Sarlo”, and in many cases both, subtracts significantly from the flow of the story – even with the few uses of ”dark sider” to cut down on the uses of ”Sarlo”, it is just
too much. It
is hard to find alternate ways of referring to people without it seeming out of the place to the reader, but hey, nobody said writing had to be easy.
GUESS: I'm lost here. The English is good enough for either a native speaker or for a very good non-native one. The writing seems effortless which suggests a veteran writer. I don't recall any AAR writer who's written detailed fighting scenes to the degree it happens here save Lord Durham, but his writing skills are better than this – he knows better than using the names of the people involved in every sentence as one can see by reading some of his swords and sorcery novels. Then again, it is few AARs in which we see descriptions of one-on-one combat and the choice of the Star Wars universe imposes so many restrictions on words chosen that even if the writer is one I have read several AARs by, I might not recognize it here due to the enforced vocabulary and style.
------------
#4.
Very well written overall, good characterization, and for once it isn't obvious what's going to happen at the end. I tell a lie. Joe is going to win, because the author is a bleeding heart, but it is written in a way such that death of the main character is an entirely acceptable outcome to the story.
There's one thing that really annoys me, given the attention to detail in the rest of the story, and it is this paragraph:
Then came the night Sarah told him about Ari. The jeweler‘s son was promised Sarah’s hand. The night she came to Joe in tears, he swore they would be wed. Joe went to Ralph that night, to tell him what had been happening. That’s when the violence started. Ralph felt it was an affront to him and his crew. First they broke into Ari’s store, and then burnt down a local deli. Sarah’s father, Isaac, struck back. He hired one of the China-men gangs to jump Fat Ricky in Bridgeport. In response, Ralph called up the Irish mob. From that moment on, it was a war. But all that was over now, it came down to tonight, at eight.
Quite simply, given the devotion to detail in the other paragraphs, everything happens too fast here and, considering the rest of the setup, it isn't all that believable.
Joe works for Ralph. He tells Ralph, whom we are assured is a hardened criminal and gang leader (the elder brother of Al Capone, not as smart or vicious a criminal as his brother but not an idiot either), that he loves Sarah but she's promised to somebody else.
From what we are told, he doesn't tell Ralph Capone that he (Joe, Ralph's man) isn't considered good enough for Sarah or anything else that could be considered an insult to Ralph, he's told that Sarah is already promised to somebody else. Based on the information the reader is given, there's zero reason for Ralph to feel it is an insult to him or his crew. Given what we know of Ralph Capone in our universe (as opposed to the one this tale takes place in) it also seems out of character. Of course, Joe may have misrepresented the situation to Ralph, but we are not given any indication that this is the case.
Now, in the tale's universe Ralph has taken over as leader and may have changed significantly from the point of divergence, but even so, breaking into Ari the Jeweler's store
and burning down a local deli (why?) seems like a remarkably poor choice compared to starting out by sending out one or two guys to have a chat with Ari concerning a change of plans, which sounds more like the choice a sensible boss would follow if he wanted to aid one of his men. This somehow leads to the direct involvement of (at least) two other mobs apart from Ralph's men – the Chinese via Sarah's father and the Irish via Ralph.
Now, in something that was placed in a land of your imagination, that would be fine, but in alternate history with recognizable names... it deserves a better explanation.
GUESS: This reminds me of something that Storey or Director could have written. I don't know if they are writing these days, but the excellent use of characters combined with mastery of the English language is something that few people in the AAR forum mastered when I was a regular visitor. There's undoubtedly many more since then (4 years of experience will change people and, of course, there are many writers I've never read something by), but the devotion to writing a good
story first and foremost – that does remind me of Storey and Director above most other AAR writers.
------------
Just one more thing, and this is something that all four authors could benefit from. Read ”The Tough Guide to Fantasyland” by Diana Wynne Jones. If you ever intend to write
anything in Fantasy style, this will help you avoid some very common pitfalls in writing and characterization or at least make sure that you know what you are doing. If you don't... the analogies you can draw between the issues brought up in this book and the style of writing you prefer will also help you. Finally it is a quite fun book in its own right.
