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Cyzinthia & Ur'Bluorg - Detailed Feedback

Intro:

Cyzinthia & Ur'Bluorg was written by NikaHikari. It is a short science fiction story following a planet named Otuzl. It is split into five countries but is united as one to fight off invaders from outer space. The story has a lot of interesting action set pieces and unique ideas that set it apart from other science fiction books.

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What Worked:

The juggernauts kind of remind me of X-men sentinels due to how they're described. The comic book versions, anyway. Dark purple with armor resembling a spacesuit. Maybe that's just a me thing, but it was fun to have a little visual in my mind about how they looked, and I wonder if you maybe had inspiration from the X-men comics while making the juggernauts? Juggernaut is an X-men character too, which is why I ask.

I bring that up because I like the concept of the juggernauts. It may just be because I'm a sci fi nerd, but I always loved concepts about massive, powerful entities. The juggernauts are intimidating forces, and I like how they were introduced. They were introduced as powerful and unstoppable. They won. That made them so intimidating. In a way, their introduction reminded me a bit of Thanos from the Avengers. Not just because he's purple, but also because he beat Hulk's booty and proved a strong, intimidating villain in the first scene.

It's rare the opening scene shows the villain winning by a landslide, and watching the juggernauts win on such a scale was not only fun (not in a psychopathic way, I mean fun in an entertaining way lol), but it also set the stakes and introduced a new concept in an intriguing manner. Overall, I think the juggernauts were executed really well!

In general, the story's concept was the strongest part of the book, in my opinion. I was instantly hooked by the blurb. Granted, I may be biased since, like I just said, I'm a sci fi nerd, but I got super excited to read about a new planet with five countries. I've read a lot of sci fi books, but this has more outlandish and otherworldly concepts than most I've read, which is a good thing because it ensures I'm not going to forget it anytime soon. It'll stick in my memory as a story with many complex, creative ideas.

I think there are some very fascinating ideas in here that relate with many real-world events. I always find it fun when sci fi authors take these otherworldly concepts and make them feel like they're happening right now in present day. Like in chapter 3 with the, "that side started it, we are only retaliating" [talking about wars].

There are many ways you can interpret that line and how it ties into the themes in the story; however, since I don't want to get too political, I'll let everyone reading this decide what they want to take from that line. I personally think it's a beautiful line in the sense that it hints at so much chaos happening both in your book and in real life. It's a line so heartbreaking because of what it implies, but also so realistic. It's a scary thought. A sci fi story taking place in a planet so different from our own is almost calling us, humans, out on our behavior. It's incredible, really.

Okay, I went off on a tangent about that one line, so let's move on before I get carried away haha.

I mentioned in the intro that your story has interesting action set pieces, and I wanted to expand on that here. The action scenes all happen in unique places where the environment plays a role in the fight. This is a smaller action scene that's more just an explosion, but the sun explosion in chapter 6 was crazy. It's not every day you read a book where the sun literally explodes, and beyond that, it's treated like an "oopsie" moment that was both kind of funny and also super intriguing to think about how another world would react to a situation like that. I mean, if our sun exploded, we'd all be dead and freaking out. In this, Cyzinthia literally laughs it off. It quite literally was an "oops, sorry, my bad guys I accidentally blew up the sun." Those kinds of moments play with our expectations, and while readers are freaking out, these characters are like "Lol my bad." It's great stuff that makes for an entertaining read.