by Sailormoon5645
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Ill Never Forget But Ill Move on: The Rewrite
PLOT: Serena Taylor, a pregnant teenager, tries to live her life without Darien, the man she loves. Unfortunately, this means shacking with Seiya, a man who commits unspeakable crimes on her. Will she ever be able to break free?
NEW CHARACTERS: Serena and Seiya's lawyers, the judge
LENGTH: 6,921 words (original) 6,329 words (rewrite)
RATING:PG
COMMENTS: It's very rare in fandom that you get rewrites, at least in my experience. Usually, though, the rewrites - whether it be goodfic or bad - are of the same quality as the originals, not much better, not much worse. Hence why this story is of such interest - aside from being written by the new fic-a-day wonder, Sailomoon5645, both versions are pretty bad, but the complete, one-shot rewrite, which is promised to be changed to be 100 times better than the original, is actually considerably worse than the incomplete, multi-chaptered original.
Both versions basically offer the same schitck - a pregnant Serena (with twins in the original) is dumped by Darien for unknown (and in the rewrite unresolved) reasons and an eeeeebily abusive male Seiya steps in and completes the Sailormoon5645 Triumvirate of Jaded Lovers (better-than-thou "Ray" makes a cameo as Darien's new girl; bouncy buxom Beryl must have won that lawsuit regarding Desiered love and When worlds collide) by raping Serena. Both versions of the rape - and the resulting trials - give How Can I Go On? a very good run for its money as the worst representation of rape and of how any judicial system works, ever. Both version suffer from the author's trademark misspellings (Since when does anyone aside from dogs like it "ruff"? For that matter, who the heck is "Seriatim"?) and slaughtering of characterization, as well as a lack of research regarding pregnancy (since when does someone who is one month along with one kid really "show"?).
But what makes the rewrite just that much more unbearable is poor Seiya thinking he's the bastard child of a Lifetime movie villain, Mankind, and Fred Durst. Stuffing a sock into someone's mouth to show someone is evil is disgusting, not to mention needlessly redundant, especially when said person is an abuser that got drunk in order to feel better about raping their already emasculated victim anyhow. That and his whole "I'll kill someone" ranting and pill-forcing just shows that not only can the author not make a decent characterization, she can't even make a decent villain, and in fact makes him laughably worse than before. There are two reasons for this: the author's lack of understanding of SM canon (willful or otherwise) and the fact that she whips up her stories in the time it takes to make a meat loaf.
The best thing that the author can do now is to discontinue her writing and get better acquainted with the Sailor Moon metaverse and with the general tenets of writing in general - and a beta reader - before attempting any more stories, let alone any rewrites of her current ones. That almost every story she has written is on here is no coincidence - hers is the result of writing stories too quickly and it shows. Being "new" does not excuse her from taking her time before posting on public forums; it only makes it worse. In other words, Sailormoon5645 needs to make good on her promise of making her stories "100 times better" and understand that therein lies the core of her inability to get better; otherwise, she'll really look like a "dumby" when her next badfic comes out and ends up on here.
Sailor Moon and related characters are copyrighted ©1991-2006 Naoko Takeuchi.
