#has been rewritten by illidan
Could you go into more detail about your criticisms? Wota is knaak-y af but what do you dislike about them specifically?
So besides the mechanical stuff like always calling people by epithets instead of their name and using “orbs” for eyes, telling and not showing, etc etc:
- He gets a certain idea of a scene in his head, and he’ll straight up repeat that scene several times in the same book or across the series. Illidan gets metaphorically pied in the face in WOTA in the same way several times, people are always bowing to Tyrande and she’s always telling them to not bow, in Stormragethere’s constant “oh I’m actually in a nightmare” scenarios… Like, basically there’s a ton of scenes that are fine- or great even- on their own but he just like uses it again and again, it becomes almost a parody of itself. It does nothing to move the plot forward, it’s like someone telling you a story they’ve already told you before and they don’t realize it.
-In general, the writing feels really rambly… like, GET TO THE POINT, HAVE A PLAN. He will introduce an interesting character interaction or situation… which will just have no pay off or never be returned to. It feels like he doesn’t plan out arcs, or if he does, he only plans out dry ass plot stuff and not character interaction. There’s several times where people are separated, it’s a big deal, and when they’re finally reunited it’s either completely underwritten or just nonexistent because ON WITH THE PLOT I guess. It just leaves you feeling super deprived lol.
- Occasionally there’s just some weird shit, like.. makes me wonder if Knaak is an alien shit lol. Word order, word choice.. some stuff I can’t even assign a feeling too because I’m like, I don’t even know what was intended here. Other stuff, I realize what he means, but it’s written so clumsily and weirdly that it could easily be interpreted as something else…. like for instance…. he doesn’t want to use “Shh” for some archaic writing rule reason (I assume), so he just has people say “Hush”……….which without any context….. to some dumbass VO director in a booth…. could look at and think Malfurion is telling Tyrande to STFU……. when instead it is ACTUALLY meant to be is a NICE gentle calming “shh” and TYrande says the SAME thing to him earlier in the book and it’s also meant to be NICE and now everyone including me thought malfurion was an aSSHOLE skdjfslkjdf
-He fairly consistently writes characters well, but when he doesn’t, it’s extra awkward, like for comparison- when I don’t like Christie Golden’s character writing, I think it’s because I disagree about how the character should be. When I dislike Knaak characters, it’s usually because it’s like not consistent within it’s own characterization, or he’s willing to just flip a switch on a character if the book needs it. IN general he’s not great with nuance lol.
