The writing is not good

This is the sort of story I normally drop in the first handful of chapters due to severe writing issues, but I was curious as to how a story with such amateurish writing ended up rated a 9.2. After reading the whole thing, I'm still not entirely sure, as the primary flaws exhibited at the beginning never really improved, but I did come away with an idea of what types of people might rate it a 5/5.

* Someone who is just interested in smut and doesn't care about plot/story.
* Someone who hasn't read much and doesn't understand the difference between good/bad writing.
* Someone who liked the art, which was mostly pretty good.
* Someone who just rates everything they read 5/5.

I don't think it's a problem to like it for any of these reasons, but this is by no means a well-written story. The setting is ill-defined at the beginning, the characters aren't established well, the pacing is atrocious, and the backstory is generally explained too late to give context to the things going on in the story. Also, there are two problematic elements: "incest", and a stockholm syndrome romance, which I'll explain in more detail after the spoiler space.

(spoilers)
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General writing issues first.

- Characters are not properly established. This is a multi-tiered problem, since there are several characters that do matter to the "plot" in this story, but none of them are established enough to make it compelling. The writing of the characters is way more important than anything else, because it allows readers to overlook bad/incomplete plot elements, and other structural issues, as long as they like the characters and their dynamics.

-- Who Alexander is, his personality, his desires and dreams, how other people who know him perceive him, who he has conflicts with in his family or at the castle and how he handles them, etc... This all needs to be established early on so that we can have some idea of what to expect from him when he encounters things in the plot. Then, when reading some of the Kline-backstory-with-Alex scenes, we'll have a better idea of if this Alexander is the person that Kline is looking for or not. But as it is, Alexander's personality isn't well-defined enough to tell, and it's definitely not well-defined enough to make his relationship with Kline compelling in a story primarily about their relationship.

-- Shio's relationship with Alexander seems fraught, but no explanation is given until it's too late, and the characterization is inconsistent leading up to that point. Rather than depict Shio alone as wishy-washy about his brother through the whole comic, start the characters off in the capital sparring with each other to establish their relationship. Have their father walk in to establish how the father treats both boys compared to each other, and how Shio reacts to what he perceives is his father's preference for his brother. Make it ambiguous, to where Shio could think there's favoritism, but vague enough to where he's totally misinterpreting, which would be revealed at the end of the story. This would also serve to introduce the idea that Alexander is a good swordsman and does in fact best his brother every time, which would be a proper setup for that plot point during the climax. This would go a long way to making the readers care about their relationship during their fight at the end of the story.

-- Kline is horribly bland. He does have some backstory stuff defined for him at least, but nothing really grew out of it, beyond him having mommy issues and wanting to bone the Alex from his past. He doesn't seem to have any personality quirks, traits, or desires/dreams beyond wanting Alex back. While you can empathize with his plight some, you can't really connect with his character because he doesn't have one. Show him doofing around his house in his solitary day-to-day life, give him a pet fox or something that he hangs around with. Show him dealing with a human intruder alone, how he handles the situation before Alexander has come into the picture. We need to know who Kline is before he meets up with Alexander in order to understand how meeting Alexander changes him.

- Lack of early setup and background for the main conflict. There's no understanding at the beginning of why it matters that Kline's a dragon. Show the background of the war with the dragons at the beginning of the comic. In fantasy properties, it's fine to spend a few panels or even a whole chapter showing/explaining what the state of the world is, to get the reader grounded in the reality of the completely made-up setting. This would've allowed for the readers to understand early on that Kline being a dragon is risky for him and liable to cause a conflict with Alexander and Alexander's family.

- The pacing is bad. In general, too little time is spent showing the details of the characters and the setting before and in-between plot points. Alexander and Kline meet for the first time at the end of chapter 1, and by the end of chapter 2, Kline is balls-deep into Alexander, out of 30 chapters. This is incredibly rushed. And then Alexander goes off to Kline's house for like 20 chapters, where time slows down to a crawl so that twelve smut scenes can be smashed in. And then the author realizes s/he needs to wrap up the story in chapter 22 or so, and then the whole ending is rushed because those last few chapters aren't enough to move the plot in present day along at a sensible pace while providing all the missing backstory we'd needed up until that point. Rushed, drags, rushed. It is never a bad thing to take then time to build up your characters and setting properly, and to provide more and more detail as you go.

- The characters don't act like normal people. No one's as dumb and naive as Alexander. Almost every choice he makes early in the story is unrealistic and serves only to accelerate the "plot" to get to the smut scenes. Characters will do something then immediately say "why did I do that?" all the time in this story. This is laziness, where the author realizes that this is out of character, but needs something to happen to move the plot along, so makes the character do it anyway. It's just baffling.

- Magic system is too ill-defined. The author needs to explain how the magic works and how a person is able to use it. You can say "all dragons have magic innately" and that's fine, since it's a very common thing in fantasy lore, but clearly daddy and Shio were magic users and Alexander wasn't at all. Why wouldn't he be too? Do you have to have the capability in your blood? Or can you just decide to learn it? Was he too stupid to learn it? Also, magic systems need downsides and limitations. You have to establish what magic can do, how it is used, and what it takes out of you to use it. The big showdown at the end lacked stakes because there was no understanding of the danger involved in throwing magic around.



Confusing story choices.

- Who is Kline's mother and why did she do what she did? It wasn't really wrapped-up in any satisfying way. The implication was that she had good reasons for murdering her husband, burning the village, ditching Kline, and running away, but it was never explained. Explaining this is important because it's part of Kline's character development (accepting the draconic part of himself).

- The communication crystals make no sense. They were shoved into the story to solve the problem of how to communicate long-distances since people in this setting don't have cell phones. The implication is you can just go into town and buy a sack full of them, and then send messages to whoever you feel like. Which, that being the case, why wasn't the king getting random communications from random villagers all the time with grievances, or trolling, or anything like that. Because you know that'd totally happen. It also wasn't clear if there was any way to identify the sender, or if Shio et al just happened to know the one messaging them was Alexander because it sounded like him or whatever. If some rando calls you using a communication crystal, will you really know who it is and/or where to find them?

- Their mission to the town at the beginning was some kind of nebulous bandits/monsters tax-fraud scheme, but it was so poorly defined that it was impossible to understand, and the readers are immediately dumped out of story immersion as their eyes glaze over. Give them a real mission to be looking into that showcases some of Alexander's personality and capabilities or something, and do all this BEFORE he meets Kline. Maybe have Orcs raiding the village and have Alexander take care of it, and then the captured orcs mention there's a place in the forest they're scared of and won't go (aka, Kline's house).

- The weird tax thing and backstory with the village mayor being salty over his son and Kline's mother is not worked together in a comprehensible way. I mean, Kline is his grandson; doesn't he even care at all? Also, a dragon burning the village after the dragon wars was already over; how did this go unnoticed by the king, who hates dragons like crazy? The story did have random villagers say they had been keeping it quiet, but the burning of the village to the ground would be obvious for months after the fact; you wouldn't really be able to hide it at all. It makes no sense. I'm also not clear on how Kline didn't end up being taken by his mother given how little he was at the time. So she burned the village, wasn't stopped or defeated in any way, and then randomly decided to leave an, at most, 4yo (ch6) in the forest and no one helped him, but he was ok somehow anyway? I dunno... this is a good showcase of how the author doesn't know how to coherently string plot elements together to build something believable.

- Alexander wanders off into the woods and gets lost, and then Kline picks him up, and then they just go off to bone for days or weeks, and even though there's knights and other people from the capital wandering around in the village, and those other people for some reason either don't realized that the prince is missing or do know and don't care enough to search for him? Whyyyy.

- The story gave the impression that Alexander was just brought along on the mission to humor him, like they were babysitting him while he played knight. The townspeople repeated rumors they heard about Alexander being a badass, which just made it seem like it was complete BS nonsense when contrasted with Alexander's actual actions, because the first thing that Alexander does is get lost in the forest while going for a walk, and the second thing he does, is let a random stranger convince him to take a D up the butt. Clearly this means Alexander is just plain incompetent and that he's only in the position he's in because he's the king's son, not because he earned it. But then at the end, he's like a good fighter after all? It's so confusing and inconsistent.

- How did Shio not see the guy slinking up behind Alexander to stab him at the end? He was shown in several panels and looked like he was moving slow, and was directly in Shio's line-of-sight. Also, what was the point of the stabbing anyway? Well, I'll tell you -- the author needed something to trigger Kline to turn into a dragon. But after that, the wound barely seemed to do anything to him, and Alexander went running off to Kline after that like it was no big deal, and didn't even seem to need any kind of healing. It didn't permanently scar him or anything. And then the guy who stabbed him was forgotten after Alexander runs over to Kline. This was just a lazy, shoe-horned plot point to get the half-dragon to turn into a dragon to escalate the situation.



Problematic elements.

- Kline and Alexander's relationship is based on a stockholm syndrome plot. Kline coerced dumb-dumb Alexander into sex, saying it was some kind of "magic cure" for his memory. Several smut scenes later, the "magic transfer" context was dropped completely and they just called it sex after that. It was always just sex. There was no indication that magic was happening. Magic being used was generally depicted as having that mysterious red halo around it, and the sex never had that. While I'd like to think Kline probably didn't lie, there was also again no establishment of Kline's character that early in the story to know the he's not the sort of person who would lie.

- There are several STRONG hints that Alexander's lil brother Shio is in love with their dad, and wants to split his buns in twain if given the chance. The reader is lead to believe that this is incest until way later in the story, where we get a flashback that shows that Shio and Alexander were actually adopted. Now, even though it turns out they aren't blood-related, some readers still consider this incest and squicky, and will refuse to read it completely based on this fact alone. I'm just not sure if this was a great element to include/imply in a story that already has many readability issues.



Anyways, feel free to like this story or not, ain't no skin off my teeth.