Pastiche Parade - An Information Age Fantasy

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

The year is 12009. Everyone has a flip phone, social media is on the rise, spellbooks can be pirated online, hermits share their wisdom through blogs, magical girls are the face of advertising campaigns and endangered elemental beasts are championed in useless online petitions.

Amidst all this noise, three girls are punched into each other's paths.

Pastiche Parade is a casual, low-stakes adventure set in a fantasy world that has reached something equivalent to our contemporary age.

It focuses on the slice-of-life of three dog girls who have formed an adventurer party called Cerberus, as they try to make some easy money and not get too caught in all the plots and intrigues of government agencies, mega-corporations, knightly orders, secret societies, mystical sects, witch covens, and many, many others.

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Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2023
Author: Laranja Maracuja

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.9/ 5.0
Followers: 16
Views: 5,791

Chapters(17 total)

Reviews

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Community Reviews(3)

DischtopiaRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Pastiche Parade follows a mercenary group of dog-ladies on their adventures through a fantasy world with contemporary tech.
Style: By and large, the prose flows nicely and what few flaws there are get overshadowed by the story's strong points.
The standout issues here are the occasional mishandling of expressions and advanced vocabulary, (to be expected for an author not writing in their native tongue) and dialogue that could stand to come across a little more natural (though it is quite emotive and suitably conversational).
For the first problem, I might recommend googling each and every expression and piece of advanced vocabulary before adding it to the story. I do this myself sometimes even as a native english speaker. It's a great way to build up writing mastery, confidence and broaden the scope of your toolbox!
Dialogue mastery is harder and more elusive. When I say the dialogue should be "more natural", I mostly mean more contractions. More informality. And usage of punctuation in a way that evokes the cadence of human speech.
Neither of these is anywhere close to a dealbreaker. In fact, the story's style is incredibly fun and enjoyable! But if the author is looking to polish things up, these facets would be a good place to start.
Story: The worldbuilding in Pastiche Parade is excellent and very compelling. It's a fantasy world, but everything is commercialized, a prime example being when a caster's spell backfires because she ostensibly skipped its credits sequence. Really cool idea, there.
The plot thus far is also action-packed and heartwarming. The prologue has some great fight sequences, and the way the three mains come together is both logical and intriguing. A solid start indeed!
Grammar: I won't harp on this too much for the reasons given in the Style portion of the review. Yes, there are some problems here. Dialogue punctuation and the minutiae of comma use may be especially worth brushing up on. However, they don't effect the tone or readability of t
PortalCaesarRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Pastiche Parade is a breath of fresh air. As a prime example of a fantasy world that has reached modern levels of culture and technology, Pastiche Parade offers an incredibly expansive world to immerse yourself into. Numerous unique fantasy cultures, nations, and even species are featured in the story, intertwining seamlessly with novel magic systems and concepts.
One of the highlights of the story for me was when one of the three protagonists gets to work on cleaning her houseboat. It was an extremely mundane thing that came in direct contrast with how different the world of Pastiche Parade can be to ours and helped me feel like I could relate a lot more to the characters and their struggles, because honestly, who doesn't struggle with cleaning up?
English is the author's second language but I can honestly say that despite seldomly coming across the occasional typo or suboptimal grammar, the story is an easy, fun, and engaging read.
I do not offer any more criticism as the author themselves has already expressed their desire to rewrite the story, giving the second draft more structure and working on the character arcs some more.
All in all, I fully recommend Pastiche Parade and eagerly await the upcoming rewrite!
ScruffedUpRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Pastiche Parade follows a story in the same way you follow a crack head, one moment you think you'll understand what they'll do next, then they rip their own bones out to try and sell the 'copper' inside of them.
The books funny, I will give it that, with magical girls, werewolves, and terms of services that are treated like Divine Decrees.
I am not one for magical girl type stories, the book doesn't really follow a genre I enjoy, but it's still enjoyable even if I am not 100% engaged by MG's.
Style:
The style of the story follows itself closely, in that it follows little closely at all, one moment you're fighting slimes, then facing off against corporate soldiers, then getting into more trouble somewhere else. It's nonsensical in a good way, and I did laugh at a few parts even though I am not 100% a fan of Magical Girl based stories. However it has a theme, and it plays it well. 5/5
Story:
I will be honest, I barely understood the story, theres magic, theres magical girls, werewolves, corporate rats who worship the terms of service, and much more. I found reading it enjoyable and I thought it was funny the way the world they were portrayed in as balls to the wall crazy. The whole world is run by corpo's n magical people, its like a magical version of cyberpunk 2077 in that regard. Replace robots with elementals and monsters and you basically have a good idea I think.
Grammar:
I didn't notice any grammar mistakes, nor did the writer put any odd writing styles into it that detracted from the reading experience, which is good because I think I have whiplash already from reading it.
in a good way.
Overall the writing is clean and if there are issues I haven't noticed any yet. 5/5
Character:
The characters are all unique in their own little way, as I said before the story goes from 0-1000 real quick, so you can easily differentiate the characters from each other, hell they even have their own pixel art, which I appreciate. 5/5
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Overall I think the story is well writt