Round 1-5 - Zhaneel - The One
Ouch! Damn, that is harsh. I was just starting to kinda care about Karen when she was whacked. Again, Ouch!
OK, what do I say about this? (Besides Ouch.)
I can empathize a bit with Karen. High School can be tough. Heck, I was a 4-year letterman and I hardly fit in with most of the cliques. That feeling of constantly being ignored and then embracing that as a method of dealing with it is an interesting take. You conveyed that pretty well.
Void's attention and how he was slowly drawing her out is really nice. The first real attention she has had focused on her for who she is. Not as an annoyance, but as somebody that Void seems to actually like and care for. The interplay of her emotions seemed to work a bit too cleanly for me. Emotions are messy at times and it felt like hers were riding in perfect tune to what the story needed. Just enough self-doubt, slowly welling up and the peak of self-confidence. It felt more like a gentle wave of emotion instead of a jarring roller coaster. I'm not saying she needed to be a stereotypical mess, but in high school, emotions seemed to rapidly raise you up and then crash you back down. That was what it felt like for me and seemed to be the way many people I knew also felt, when you could get them to admit to feeling anything. Of course, maybe other people didn't have that experience and I am projecting too personally? In any case, that build up of self-confidence was working nicely after the high priest blessed her. I was actually thinking she might come out of it having done something positive and that the story would be about her burgeoning self confidence. But no, let's kill her instead. Ouch! Nicely done.