Hey, guys, this is Mikey M. Hype speaking as myself and not the "bum behind McDonald's" that I usually portray. I figured that, since Doug Walker gives a real review to accompany his newer Bum Reviews, I'd do it, too.
Subject for now is Spiderman 4 by Eddie Kennedy. I'm going to be honest and say "I hated this fanfiction".
The fanfiction itself was such a pain to read because it's so terribly written and paragraphed that you HAVE to read its horrid-ness in order to make left from right...okay, even THEN, you struggle.
I also didn't like just how much Eddie Kennedy showed very little respect the comic-verse and the movie-verse in this fanfiction. I may not read the comic books as much as I watch the movies, but I can understand artistic license, hence why I'm not too upset with the Iron Man, Thor, or the original Spider-Man movies: they made more than a few changes, but kept it likeable and cool.
Unfortunately for comic-book movie fans like myself, Eddie Kennedy either doesn't try harder to make his stories better or he doesn't get what it is that readers want from a comic-book-movie-based fanfiction.
The pacing is all over the place, for starters. It swaps to scenes, puts in pointless ones, and is just too all-over-the-place that it becomes annoying very, VERY fast. And, as expressed by another critic, the action scenes and characters have no descriptions. The author would say "they fought hand-to-hand" or "tossed over at" (which made me laugh), but leaves out who's fighting and who does what to who.
The characters are all bland except for J. Jonah Jameson, quite possibly everyone's favorite character in the Raimi movies. The only reason I could tell the characters apart was because they were mentioned by name. Other than that, it was bland and BORING.
Kletus Kassidy and Aunt May had practically no roles in this fic either. All Kletus did was run around and "be evil", getting no glimpses at all into the character's insanity. And the fact that Aunt May died in the second freakin' chapter means that Eddie was just being lazy. It would have been more dramatic if she was SLOWLY dying and dies either near the end of a story or in the middle so that the hero could struggle with his mindset and ask if his life and duty is really worth anything.
And I do have to agree with the Insane Critic on one thing. I did not like Eddie Kennedy turning Felicia Hardy into the Vulturess. I wiki'd up the scrapped Spider-Man 4 and Ed Kennedy, I think, failed to realize that the "Vulture and Vulturess" on the site were discussions, not confirmations. And it's information like that that kind of makes me glad that the fourth movie was scrapped...though I would've liked to see Lizard on the big-screen.
While I DO admit that I want to see Spider-Man fight Lizard and Carnage, I'd probably prefer it if he did the two separately, not both at once. Multiple villains in a single superhero movie are always kind of iffy, for lack of a better word, and I have to say that two is probably the limit. And, because Eddie Kennedy doubled the amount, it really surmounted to being "awful".
Something that also gives me an ulcer about the fic is that Eddie Kennedy seems to have NO idea on how these Marvel characters work. The way he writes, Lizard is a symbiote and Vulture and Vulturess "transform". I know that some people crack the "Transformers" jokes, but for some reason, I keep thinking of either X-Men's Colossus or Animorphs. Is that weird, or what? So, back on subject, Eddie Kennedy needs to research his comic-verse before he writes a fic about it.
So, while I do believe it VERY likely that Eddie Kennedy probably didn't mean to make a bad fic, I would also like to point this out. I was his age when I wrote my first fight ficand received my first critique. I'll just say that it wasn't nice. When I saw that people didn't like my work, I read books and other fanfictions and took example from them so that, in the end, my works were so much better. I remember that one of my first fics had nine-thousand words before, but when I was done rewriting it, the word count was in the twenty-thousand range and people really liked it.
Eddie Kennedy doesn't have any favorite fanfictions, has no favorite books that I'm aware of, and doesn't appear to heed to any criticism or advice given to him. And any direct contact ala the PM system has been unfruitful, which leads to my belief that he has no idea what he's supposed to do on this site, let alone writing. I think that the thing he needs most is being put under someone's wing and learning from them. Only time will tell if he does this or not.
I'm Mikey Hype, this is my companion review, and I'm gone. Stay tuned for a companion to my next review.