User:Daric Gaersmith/TES Fan Fiction Collection/Reading_Fan_Fiction/Honor Among Thieves

01:09, 27 May 2014 (GMT): I'm back playing Skyrim once again. I am not in ESO, so please don't ask.   Userspace Links Cartography Gallery Genealogy In Game Characters Modding on the XBox Status Update Templatery TES Fan Fiction Collection To Do List   Sandboxes — working on Alfwyn's map of Solstheim. — Apocryphal - the language on the Diiv Word Wall. — adding a referencing stylesheet to the Cite web references. — preparing rpeh's box template for a move to Templatespace. See here for details. — Rewriting the proposed "guidelines" for DLC namespaces. See The Silencer's sandbox for more details. — new content for the Geode Vein page.

introduction   This page contains my review of Honor Among Thieves: The Unwilling Nightingale by MadameHyde. Honor Among Thieves: The Unwilling Nightingale I have begun reading the most reviewed Skyrim related fan-fic tale on fanfiction.net. It is Honor Among Thieves: The Unwilling Nightingale by MadameHyde. As of today, this tale has been favorited 163 times, it has 155 follows, and 1,027 reviews! It is clearly a very popular and successful fan-fic tale. It is divided into 97 chapters, and totals 283,198 words, so it may take quite some time for me to review it, and pull out the ideas that I specifically like, to inspire my own fan fiction writing. Chapter 1: The Assignment The first thing I notice is that it is written in first-person perspective. Since my comments on Biography of a Shadowscale, I have decided that I don't overly like first-person perspective after all, for my own fan-fic writing. I see that this is also a Dragonborn tale, which I will be trying to avoid in my own fan-fic writing, to avoid contradicting established Tamrielic lore. I like the casual style of the dialogue between Morwyn and Hermir, as if they are comfortable in each others company. The personality of Hermir from the game is well presented in the line "She's a good lass, that Hermir, but so enamored with Ulfric it made me a bit sick to listen to." Capturing the essence of an NPC in such a way is something I want to emulate in my own writing. Much of what I will be writing is going to be outside of the games though, as I cover events in Tamriel's history. Sure, both Daric and Rodistyr will present events from Skyrim and Oblivion respectively, but most of the other Gaersmith patriarchs are from outside of game-related time periods, so I may not be able to reference too many NPC's in the stories of their lifetimes. I really like how, as I mentioned in my review of The Vampire's Tale, the author has brought the Divines into the common and everyday life of the characters in this tale. The mention of the amulet of Talos was a nice touch. I look forward to reading the next installment of this tale. Chapter 2: Riften I can see this is going to be tough, trying to objectively assess the salient points of the author's work without being drawn into the storyline. I had to re-read this chapter a few times to determine what it was I particularly liked and didn't like about it. The first person perspective, as I mentioned above, is still rather jarring. As for the protagonist being the Dragonborn, well, I won't keep bringing these issues up every chapter. Enough said. I think this chapter could have benefited from more tension as Morwyn tries to hide her true identity from those who she has met in Riften previously, such as Balimund. Her task of infiltrating the Thieves Guild could have been over before it even started if the local smith had called out to her by name, across the crowded marketplace. The first half of the chapter is punctuated (if you'll pardon the pun) with a lot of parenthetical insertions (oh no, a pun of a pun!) which tend to distract the reader. I want my own fan fiction writing to flow more evenly and steadily, so the reader isn't constantly brought up short when they hit a parenthesis wall. On a more positive note, I liked the transitional sentences "I turned to get a decent look at the speaker who knew so much about Dovahkiin lore..." and "I studied him a moment, trying to get a decent read on the man." They give a nice opportunity for the pace of the storytelling to change from dialogue to observation. The action scene seemed a bit unrealistic to me though. How much can one Dovahkiin achieve in the time it takes for an arrow to fly through the air? Especially when she is pretending not to be the Dragonborn. I didn't see her casting a Slow Time spell first. The description of sending "sparks arcing across the marketplace" made up for it, though, in my opinion. I like seeing how other authors describe the use of majicka. In my own writing, I can refer to real-life reenactors or martial arts schools for inspiration in describing mundane weapon activity like swords or polearms. But spell casting has no real-world analogy, so it is good to see how other authors describe it.