The Backrooms

technical execution: I mean this in the most granular and literal sense possible: on a sentence by sentence basis, how many of these would I pick out as good and memorable?

I take a moment to breathe and to really take a look at them, tall, looked like a tree, soft features, long leafy and mossy hair with big antlers made out of wood.

this is an example i randomly picked out of the piece, but there are more examples of sentences that i don't think are either as clear or evocative as they should be for the function that they are trying to serve. i'll break down what this lacks, in context, and what my replacement would be to give an idea of what i mean by this.

1:

I take a moment to breathe and to really take a look at them, tall, looked like a tree, soft features, long leafy and mossy hair with big antlers made out of wood

This sentence has redundant information inside it. the "looked like a tree" can be inferred from the details given afterwards, and "look at them" is unnecessary because ylou're already giving detail. it should be more specific to give a subjective impression — that subjective impression being "soft features — rather than telling you the subjective impression. i would cut all information that is redundant and i would try to give more visual, visceral details — even something like "plump, flushed cheeks and rounded nose" will go a long way towards painting a better picture in the reader's mind. just look at how the sentence compares to something like

I take a moment to breathe and stare at them; they were a head taller than me, with red, blushing cheeks and a knobby nose that was childlike against their long, mossy hair and wood antlers.

this could be broken up and made longer and more detailed, but for the tone of the piece, i think this works better — it's meant to be a quick line of description as the piece dashes into infatuation, and i think it works well in that context.

content: here, i'm referring to the narrative of the page — do I think it is memorable, consistent and unique? this also plays in with imagery: do I feel the narrative with what you choose to show me?

now, i do think that the decision to make this like an old folktale, as Limdoc said, was a good idea; it plays well with the topic, and frankly, i think the format is dogshit and would not have been able to hold an article like this without significant distortion and workings-around. that being said, and with consideration to the tiny scope of the actual tale itself, i still think that this could and should have done more with the little time that it had.

for one, i would have really liked to see more of an emphasis on the emotional arc of this character. like, they almost drowned. i feel like being able to use that and write about the genuine terror the character would have felt — being on solid ground one second and in peril the next — would have contrasted nicely with the euphoria of this tree yuri godddess descending down and kissing our main character. i also think that a brief snippet of the tree yuri goddess showing her true colors would have been pretty good and gone a long way in building an emotional arc for our protag. as it is, her death/maiming is lifeless, told to us as matter of fact rather than real and compassionate prose. this works in the SCP format and to a limited extent in the Backrooms format with enough contorting, but here, it just feels like a tonal mismatch — it doesn't come off like a fairytale warning, it comes off like an abrupt and unsatisfying jumpcut.