Talk:Arthur: Pal's Death/@comment-29963337-20180930031711

There are many glaring issues throughout the story.

Spelling and Grammar: Though mostly fine in the spelling aspect, there are a couple of straight up spelling mistakes. These are "distorded" (distorted), "my self" (myself) and "um" (usually written as "umm", though not necessarily a hard-written rule, to my knowledge). The plural of knife is "knives", not "knifes". Some there/their/they're confusion is also present. There means "over there" (towards something, or in a direction), they're is short for "they are", and their is possessive (belonging to something or someone). The correct statement for the offending sentence should be "[...] their voices [...]" (with [...] indicating the rest of the quote). D.W. talks in title case for some reason, in that she capitalises every word. Punctuation and captialisation: There's also a misplaced comma in the D.W. quote, which should instead be a question mark. Only "What's"and "Does" need to be capitalised, since "What's" is the first word of the quote and "Does" should follow a question mark, and "Baby" is a nickname D.W. gives to Arthur. There's a lot of misplaced commas where there should be full stops instead. The "The" is part of Alan's nickname (The Brain) and so should be capitalised.

Content, layout and wording: The prose leans heavily towards informal, which usually does not lend itself well to a serious story. The story starts with "so", which sounds more like telling your friends about your day at school than telling a well-written story. There's also the redundancy of "It started out with the intro", which is not necessary, since it's already a given that the intro starts an episode. The addition of "but whatever" doesn't help either. A better opening to the paragraph would be "The framerate of the intro was a little choppy, though I didn't pay too much attention to this minor detail.". When the next character speaks, their dialogue should always be on a new line to differentiate between speakers. Also, by "the intro", are you referring to the title card (the bit at the beginning of each episode, where a character does something, such as D.W. flying in while wearing a superhero costume and causing Arthur to spin, and then one of the characters speaks the episode's name), or the beginning of the episode proper?

Arthur looking depressed should be mentioned *after* his friends are introduced to the scene, since the sentence would otherwise be pretty clunky. Additionally, "sounded like the voice actor" is a little vague. Is the character's voice not their VA's natural voice, or do you mean that the crying sounded real and not staged?

Plot: The plot is basically the protagonist deciding to watch TV at 3 AM, and finding out that Arthur is on an earlier timeslot for some reason. In the episode they watch, Arthur finds out his dog died, he gets sad, cries a lot and kills a whole bunch of people before killing himself. The plot is not only cliché, but is pretty bare-bones. A bit of explanation and expansion can do wonders for creating an engaging story.

What exactly caused Arthur to kill himself, and what deeper effects did Pal's death have on him, besides just sadness and anger? If Arthur killed everyone in his home, then he also presumably killed his baby sister Kate, despite the fact that she did nothing wrong and didn't even get mentioned in the story. Why did he do that? Also, when he gets out the knife, where did he get it from? The kitchen would be the most likely answer in a home, but unless this is told to me, then I am to assume he somehow had it on his person without his parents finding out. Was the knife a combat knife, or a kitchen knife?

When Arthur's friends console him, I'd imagine that a bit more than a simple "there, there" assurance would be in order, unless the story shows that they cannot do anything else to help improve his mood.

What do you mean by "the camera started to glitch out"? Were there visual artifacts, like a brief filter being placed on the screen, such as going greyscale or monochrome? Was there TV static?

Where did the gun come from? Did he steal it from somebody?

In regards to the character's supposed ages, I'd assume all of them, save for Binky, to end up looking around the same age as each other, and Binky to look a bit older. Binky looking older is canon to the show anyway, since he is a larger kid who has always looked like a teenager despite only being 9 or 10 years old. 11 looking a bit older for the others is acceptable, but 15 isn't a "bit older", it's almost double Arthur's age and clear signs of puberty would be prevalent at that age. Also, what reason is there for the other characters looking older, besides there just being something off about the scene? This is besides the whole "Arthur is actually dead" thing, of course.

Disclaimer: The disclaimer after the ending kills it, if the issues above didn't already. Firstly, there is no need for a disclaimer, especially one that's this oddly stand-offish ("don't you even think of it" is not a polite statement to make). Secondly, the insistence that this isn't a trollpasta would cause readers to lean towards the assumption that it is one, even if that isn't the case. Assuring people that something isn't X tells them it most likely is X if the something in question resembles X enough. Additionally, the information about the apparent ages of the cast seems like an integral part of the story, which means that it should be integrated smoothly into somewhere in the story rather than awkwardly added on as a part of the disclaimer.

These are the most prominent issues, but there are a couple more.