Domestic Violet by Darryl Allen - Comedy - A Peaceful Man endures the abuse of his Violent Wife. 93 pages - pdf, format

Read through the whole thing and was confused to say the least.

You have a knack for dialogue, most jokes landed well and all characters had unique voices. The awkward vibe you were gunning for worked really well in most instances. I actually laughed out loud in several instances. Herman was especially entertaining.

Now to what bothered me

I don't know what the story is thematically; it seemed to veer towards different directions at different points but never settled on anything. Tonally, the final act is overly dark and out of place of with the rest.

Soon after Will and Violet got married, Will declares his expectations that she'd clean the house, wash the dishes, and make him food. That's what he grew up with and what he considered normal. He was lucky enough to land a girl way out of his league and decides to be a prick to her. At this point I'd assume the story was going to be a punitive tale of Violet putting him in has place, and in some way we'd agree that he deserved what he was getting.

That's not how it goes. The plot point of him expecting her to assume a traditional womanly role is disregarded until the very end of the plot. Instead we see him being abused and taking it throughout the story for absolutely no reason (which could work, but then there's no reason for the before mentioned scene).

So I thought, okay, it's a coming of age type thing where Will finds and claims his manhood... but that's not where it went either. By the end he's sorta a man, but not really. The reader loses sympathy for him because he's a hopeless loser -- he's in a shit situation and refuses to get out of it. Not until Violet TAKES A SHIT ON THEIR BABY does he act. Even then, he runs away first to regain composure, leaving his shat on baby with crazy ass Violet.

That leads to the ending. It's so morbid and out of place that I wonder if it's just a troll edit, made to gauge people's reactions. It's not at all satisfying, despite the reader's frustration with both characters by that point. The firefighter's comments come off as a weird, unearned, morality lesson.

The dialogue is great (up until the end), the situations funny (they're dreadful really, but you managed to make them funny), but the plot falls apart midway through. If you settled on a tone and distinctive theme I believe this could eventually make for a great screenplay.

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On the technical side of things, prefacing establishing scene headings with ESTABLISHING is unnecessary.

I'm not sure about this one, but I don't believe secondary slug lines are triple spaced (if anyone knows for sure, please share).

Introducing Will as UNKNOWN MAN is weird and unnecessary (all characters are unknown when we first meet them).

You might've done this one on purpose, but jiration isn't a word lol.

Early on you refer to princess Peach as both Peach and Toadstool -- don't think most people would realize they're one and the same.

Personal preference here, but I thought some of the early character descriptions were overly long.