Illegal Operations: Project K Sporking/Review [FINAL THOUGHTS]

So, it's time to wrap up my feelings on the first installment of the Project K Chronicles. How do I feel about it? Let's break it down.

Plot

The plot is just a rehashing of the popular and well-known Resident Evil 4. Things are merely tweaked around to accommodate the newest face to the bunch, Karla Smith. The only other semblance of a new spin on things is the Project K that Karla was apart of, being injected at a young age with some virus. There's another subplot with Wesker working to try and sway her to his side but it proves fruitless and does nothing to progress the story further.

The only other new thing is the insistence of flashbacks to the Raccoon City outbreak to tell the story of Karla and Zachary's time in Raccoon City. It's sloppily-done and the transitions into the flashbacks are non-existent - because of this we have a disjointed storyline where the readers are thrown from scene to scene with no conjunctive scenes to flow from one to the next. One minute we're following Karla, Ashley and Leon through Spain and suddenly, without warning, we're in Raccoon City with Leon, Claire, Jill, Zachary and Karla.

Characterization

I'll only focus on the fancharacters here.

Karla Smith: To be quick about this - Karla is a Mary-Sue. She is a very poor character who view people based on their usefulness to the situation at hand and if she deems someone as useless she won't hesitate to abuse, harass and threaten them. This is most seen with her later interactions with Ashley Graham. We have no idea what she likes or dislikes outside of this. All time is spent forcing the piss poor romance between Leon and Karla that there's no overarching motivations for what Karla does brought to the fore. Because I don't know what motivates her I don't care of the ending result.

She is horrendously judgmental, almost bipolar in her mood swings and arrogant to boot. If she doesn't get her way she throws a fit until it happens her way. She's completely ungrateful to anyone around her as well. Karla absolutely lives to outshine everyone around her though she can't even keep herself alive. Leon is constantly helping her up and dragging her around.

The worst part about this? Karla does not grow at all through the course of the story. She comes in as a bratty, abusive bitch and leaves a bratty, abusive bitch.

The insistence of how good a soldier Karla is reflects back on the author as Karla is, in fact, the author's avatar/self-insert. It's almost as if Gabby15cancer had some wish to go into the Army at one point and be something great and so she has included that into her avatar. However it falls flat on its face when you take into account all of the negative traits within Karla's personality and how she never would have made it past Private at the rate she's going.

Zachary Smith: For the life of me I cannot figure out why Zachary was even included in this fanfic in the way that he was. He serves no real role, ushers in no new information, nothing he does drives in anything plot-related. He's just a stand-in character to serve as Karla's guide, which is useless considering she and Leon realistically would have shared a guide. The most characterization he gets is that he's a dimwitted goofball.

Style

This is the obvious work of an amateur. Whole paragraphs are one long run-on sentence, poor characterization in already established characters, grammatical errors, the list just goes on and on. Fragments and run-ons aren't even used with artistic license as a lot of decent writers can pull off. It's just the work of an obvious rookie who didn't bother to pay attention in her English classes.

Wording is appalling with only a few choice words used over and over again. Because of this the entire work seems bland, dull and boring to read. This would have been a time when thesaurus abuse would have been almost welcome in place of the dry repetition.

Most importantly this was all in second person POV. It's a reader-style type of view from the focal point of a specific character, in this case, Karla. Thus this is all supposed to be from Karla's voice, what she can see, hear, taste or, in short, observe in general. Yet time and time again we are subjected to the stray thought of another character's while still in Karla's focal POV when she would have no way of knowing that thought. Frequently we are told how another character is feeling, what they see or remember and all from Karla's viewpoint. This is very amateur-ish and sloppy work. Likewise the narrative never changes to reflect Karla's emotions. In tense scenes sentences do not become choppier or lack a bit more detail than normal, no, they are all the same. It's stagnant.

Coming Together

All of these factors coming together form one very long, very dragging fanfiction that's not worth taking seriously at all. Everything was just sloppy. The entire thing is just hot garbage and nothing more. It's not even worth being called pulp fiction. Pulp has more substance than this ever will.