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Like the nurse says before pulling you spleen our with a rake. "this may pinch."

The letter entails the information on the whereabouts of Daedalus, Talos' savior. Reyner takes the letter to a 5 year old boy by the name Icarus (See what I did there?)

When I read "Daedalus" I cringed, when I got to "5 year old boy" I though "Oh god, please do not go there.", then you went there, so yes, I do see what you did there. This is a story that we are familiar with by early elementary school.

I've been lore building for a long time.

You are building your house with other people's bricks.
Avalon? really? Talos? Icarus and Daedalus? cliche' devil? What you have is not a great bit stolen from an obscure work, it is dead horses getting flogged yet again combined with classic names.

"Man2:    “Me said they were fresh… when we caught them!”" > "Man3:    “We be hunt’n demons.”..
So Bill Dance and Roland Martin: demon hunters? They brought a bird in a cage, are they also part time miners?
Well OK, I like the idea of professional fishermen who hunt demons in their spare time, as I haven't seen that done yet. Hmm maybe competitive waffle chefs who hunt vampires? Wait no that other guy had one about a pizza guy who fought zombies; too close. Back to fishermen!

Man3:    “Ha ha… Always a real asshat, you are.”/Man1:    “Too funny! Glad I’m not stuck out here with some dipshits
Asshat? Dipshits? Can we expect a "Fo shizzle my Nizzle" soon?

"Scene: A tail slowly reaches down behind him."
Alien made this big. since then it has been reused too many times.

"Scene: The bird in the cage starts flying at the small bars, chirping like crazy."
A dove can flap around in a cage but it cannot fly (size of dove vs size of cage vs what it takes to fly). Also, doves do not "chirp". You are confusing doves with the "panicking sparrow/canary in cage" scenes, that have been beaten into the ground.

"Scene: A splat of blood lands on the white dove."
/facepalm. How many movies/shows have you seen this symbolism used in? Normally it would represent the loss of innocence in a scene like this (this is sledge hammer symbolism here, nothing subtle about it). You just put it in because you liked the last bazillion times you saw others do it, didn't you?

"he slashed into a Dire Wolf with horns. "
Lets put horns on it. Putting horns on it always makes it demonic/in the future, after the apocalypse! Who cares if horns on a wolf are superfluous (they already have very effective teeth) and would only get in the way, thus getting horned wolves selected out?
Nice on going PC and making the alpha female.. screw biology. and yes I know that in a pack the alpha male and female are the only ones who usually breed. It is just when people refer to the "Alpha" it is the bigger stronger male who fights that tends to get the title.

"Nate and Amber discover that the demon is a girl with horns, a tail, red eyes, red hair, and sharp teeth."
With Hellraiser in 1987, Clive Barker showed that we didn't have to keep using the same cliche'd demons. We can make up our own demons.

"Amber:    “Maybe she was sick of the way the world treated her.”"
What? I don't even.. This cliche line feels REALLY shoehorned.

"Everyone has forgotten about what the world once was 3,000 years ago."
Yep, seen that badly used. Of course this depends on the complete inexplicable destruction of all knowledge/stored data and spoken word for 3000 years. Not to mention physical evidence.

"Scholars of the old days call the first century, the age of war, the second, age of apocalypses, age of savages."
Wait, is all knowledge for 3000 years lost or not?

"He plans to rally his dead fathers friends in the surrounding towns and cities to reforge the flames of civilization and establish law in the lands."
So this guy too knows about the civilizations of the past and plans to rebuild them? Real selective memory or something?

"Nate and the Demon girl put on a good fight in front of an ancient building until the ground collapses under their feet. "
The ground breaking away beneath their feet. Man I trot this cliche out whenever I get the chance. Birthday parties, the DMV, while sky diving, etc

"They fall in water and Nate decides to save the girl's life."
The "lets save the scary monster that was trying to eat us" implausible cliche

"Then they are attacked by a beast and the girl ends up defending Nate."
Then the equally implausible Implausible "the monster that was trying to kill us, now saves us!" cliche.

If you want to trot out the "lion's paw" please remember the mouse finds the lion in pain, not trying to actively eat the mouse.

"She gets a deep cut from the beast, and then she shows her true powers. Her cut instantly heals, steam bursting out of the wound."
Please tell me how many times you have seen this used. God, it even includes the steam.

"She then grows a bone sword out of her body in a burst of blood and steam."
/facepalm. We are all really really tired of this.

"With it, she kills the beast."
Was there any doubt? She formed blazing sword didn't she? This is clearly not GoT or Stephen King.

"Amber convinces her to tag along, giving her a new name, home, and a new life. "
Hey, that horrible monster we were fighting? Lets bring it along so it can kill us in our sleep!
Hells yeah! I love being slaughtered in my sleep!
Hey, we should name her like a puppy before she kills us tonight, lets make her slave name 'Fluffy'!
Not bad, but I'd really prefer something more cliche.

"The demon girl now goes by the name Red, as is the color of her hair, eyes, and skill.  "
Of course she does..

"The problem with me, is that I'm a perfectionist. "
“You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means..”
I suspect that this also is a line you have heard many times and so decided to use. Also remember it is a challenge, a dare to find flaw with one's work.
A perfectionist is incredibly critical of the stuff they do. They look for any mistake. They knit pick their own stuff. A perfectionist could not have generated this work.

What you have is insanely generic. This is due to it being a pile of cliches stolen from all over. The dialog doesn't work because it has the same feel and is taken from clearly "not fantasy" shows, at times. Loved when man 3 slipped into ebonics..

You need to make a universe and story that are yours and not an amalgam of stuff you saw on TV/crunchyroll over the last 3 weeks. Make characters, not card board cutouts. You need to know your characters and not just have them spit out the same lines those characters always spit out (this is not Star Trek).

I know this is brutal but hopefully it helps.
Put a little styptic on your wounds and get back to editing.

I plan to put Nate and Red into a position where they have to help each other, and I plan to show Nate feeling sorry for her. And about her regen, how the hell else is it supposed to look scientifically??? oh well, whatever.

Why does the guy who kills for a living, feel sorry for the being that kills better than he does? We have seen this done many times and usually the author does it as a balancing issue. "Well it is only fair if they have a weakness". This is bargaining on the part of the writer. The killing machine has no friends/is alone, awwww.

As for the regen. Regen used to just have the wounds close or vanish.
Once it came to scientific explanation it was concluded that nanotech or whatever it took to close a wound that fast would generate a lot of heat. Hence the steam. This then ignores what that heat would do to the cells in the area.
If it is closed by magic it is closed by magic and can simply vanish or whatever it wants to do. Just as long as the magic is consistent with the universe.

And I wanted her hair and eyes to be red because I said so. lol what's wrong with that?

Return of the hot redhead.
Also please stop with the "lol". You may be young but there is no need to advertise. Also the psychological diffusion mechanics of "lol" are ignored by myself and others. Those simple Jedi mind tricks do not work on us.

 

And she is not a demon. What's wrong with liking the idea of a Phoenix Character having red eyes and hair? I thought people would find it symbolic or cool.

Look into the X-men's Phoenix or as Wolverine called her in her Jean Grey days, "Red".  This is decades old and insanely famous.

It feels like anything can be seen as cliche. Does it come with the amount of stories in the world? Or does it come from getting older? Or perhaps my opinion is dumb.

cli·ché
klēˈSHā/
noun
noun: cliché; plural noun: clichés; noun: cliche; plural noun: cliches

    1.
    a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.

Being older gives more experience but less chance at thought due to the brain losing plasticity as it ages (most people feel about things rather than think about things, so thought is hard to come by to begin with).
With that experience you can see how many time others have done exactly that same thing. The big thing that creates cliche is "a lack of original thought", You see this in Hollywood where show writers simply imitate what they have seen.
Consider the last several years where the "terrible leader" is popular. You see it in shows like Walking Dead and Falling Skies where the leader is ready at any minute to yell something like "Muh boy!" and then sell out his group or species, This guy is a "good leader" only because the writers just have the rest of the characters talk about what a good leader he is even though his actions tend to make him the worst leader imaginable.
Instead of one show failing in this way you have writers copying other writers and thus many shows fail this way.

"It feels like anything can be seen as cliche.". Nope, there is fresh stuff but it takes work/luck.
You will see people who like to copy say "well there are only 7 original plots so everything is cliche so my stuff is good.", this is just their ego/narcissism/laziness justifying their actions.

Also, I've never seen the old star trek and I've never played much of Final Fantasy. I didn't even realize anything was a cliche until you said something.

Old Star Trek did some amazing things for its time. But its time was a bazillion years ago.
ST Next Gen was abysmal with cardboard cut out characters, cliche'd writing, and no consistency or thought. Unfortunately once you have infinite energy and can make anything you want with a replicator, your writing world is a minefield where you tend to blow yourself up with stupid a lot. It should also be noted that during the run of STNG they put an ad in Locus admitting they were out of ideas and looking for writers, you can watch the credits and see that from there on out they didn't actually pick much in the way of new writers and just went on with their "no new ideas".
When I ask a ST fan why they like it, the answer was that they found the cardboard cutouts to be comforting and consistency was not needed as they liked to view each ep as its own stand alone experience. So what they were looking for was The Twilight Zone/Outer Limits in space.
After Next Gen, DS9 came around which was the best of ST because it was feeding of JMS's B5 (JMS's pitch was actually completely stolen for the DS9 pilot). DS9 was the best because it was actually stealing from a quality show.
After that was Voyager which was Gilligan's island in space. The Captain was Gilligan. Needless to say this was a crime against all writing.
Then there was Enterprise. This show was like drinking sewage from a fire hose.

Maybe I'm just a bad writer.

It is to early to tell.
It is like saying you are a bad boxer or body builder on your first day in the gym. There are years of blood, sweat, and tears ahead of you. Maybe you will be great, maybe you will be like the rest of us.

For a moment, after reading your review, I genuinely thought I should give up trying.

Very few people are amazing on their first trip to the gym.
My first "real" writing was a short with a guy escaping an exploding ship to show my mom (a professional author) how a story should start. I was in 6th grade and it was needless to say, not good.

I've wrote 18 different version of chapter one over the past 7 months and I was never satisfied with any of them.

So far all you've seen are random, unorganized scribbles of events I want to happen.

That and a really rushed script.

These conflict and thus come off as defensive. Don't sweat it. If your work gets shredded into thin enough strips you may be able to weave a really nice story out of it.
Also the writing is the easy part. The endless passes of editing where you keep correcting mistakes and polishing things is where the real work comes in.

Tell me what you really think, what do you think I should do?

Think of this as boxing. You just got knocked down by a kid who is smaller and younger than you. So you get up, the coach tells you what you did wrong, then you go back in and the kid knocks you down again. You are going to get knocked down a lot. You are going to get back up a lot. The coach will keep telling you what went wrong and to get back in there.
Years from now when you are surveying a new martial arts school and swelling up the lead student's head like a tomato, while he can't even touch you, you may, just may, remember how long it took to get to that point.

As you do not have much experience start watching things from the "OK what are they doing wrong?" view point and not the "Oh man is this cool!" viewpoint. Learning to spot other's mistakes can help you spot your own. You can also keep a notebook to write down what went wrong and then take it in a whole new direction in your work. Cliche's that do not play out like cliches are seen as clever and fresh. Sharpen your claws and shred others stuff, simply to get better at shredding your own stuff.
Last night I watched an episode of Crossing Lines on Netflix. In the episode they trotted out the standard big bank caper with a ton of people and hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and man power. This was to get to the old sewers  below the vault so they could use it to get to the prison a few blocks away (hey look this time they are getting out through the sewers that are not actually under banks, rather than in through them!) and free a friend then go another block or two and get up to the street and get away unnoticed. What horrible mistakes did they make?

How many years at 12 hours a day of anime do you have to watch to get a good grasp on cliches? WARNING: this will reduce anime to "just another medium" in your eyes.
OMG the DBZ Sayans are just knockoffs of Locke The Superman! (Locke/Superman.. how is that for faux clever reference? Blech.). Then there is all the real world knowledge. Then there is the life experience. Then there is..
The thing about sites like this is you can get this from others who can say "People only work like that in badly written movies" or "Yeah, that is a dead horse, stop beating it.". Then there is stuff like "the dialog feels wooden, does X work for your character?".
Learning from your own mistakes is a sucker's game, learning from other's mistakes is where you make the money. Basically this is a place to make things easier if emotionally uncomfortable during the process. The end goal is a better product.
If you want a site where people will just pat you on the back no matter what you write, Manga Raiders is all about that. I think this site was set up because people wanted their writing to go beyond 2 6 year olds smashing their action figures together and arguing about who would win.

Annnnnd since you think this is a story you've seen before, what do you think is going to happen?

With cliche there are so many places it could go that others have gone before. There could be a romance with Red, Red could sacrifice themselves, or both! Red could go on as a baddest man alive, with the other characters being a worship engine that is only there to help show the audience how awesome Red is.
If you were Stephen King you would set Red up for any of these and just kill them off. GoT does the same thing and it is refreshing. The thing about killing off characters left and right is that threatening situations are actually threatening as the audience doesn't know that the main character will make it out just fine like always. The draw back it that you have to kill off characters you have developed and gotten to know.

Or you could go full soap opera! "OMG, Red is Nate's transvestite twin who everyone though was dead but was actually in a coma, in zombie Hitler's secret reality TV show studio/lab/secret prison!"

Also please stop with the "lol". You may be young but there is no need to advertise. Also the psychological diffusion mechanics of "lol" are ignored by myself and others. Those simple Jedi mind tricks do not work on us.

Geez... I find you very insulting. I'm not saying "lol" to appease you or whatever it is you think i'm trying to advertise. I say it whenever I find something funny.

And this isn't my "first time to the gym" I've been trying to make this story for months. There isn't any romance with Red, no one sacrifices themselves, and she doesn't go on to be "the baddest character". She finds out what her real name is, makes a name change. After a while she'll become a leader and find a sort of family of her own. Her goal is to earn the respect of people.

Also, I wasn't trying to reference Elder Scrolls. The reason I named him Talos was because I wanted to secretly have his body be replaced by mechanical parts. In greek mythology, Talos was a man made out of bronze. It's whatever though, I think I'm just going to quit. If I ever pick it up again, I'll start everything all over.

Geez... I find you very insulting. I'm not saying "lol" to appease you or whatever it is you think i'm trying to advertise. I say it whenever I find something funny.

The regular use of "lol" and "j/k" generally profiles out to be a young male with an ego and no self confidence. Basically they protect their ego by throwing these things in after their ideas, as a out, so they can say "I said I was just kidding" when something they say gets criticized. Think of a Facebook post to a girl who is out of their league "We should go out. lol, j/k". They really want her to go out with them but they know she won't. J/K and LOL make her judging them and finding them lacking, not as hurtful as they can tell themselves and others that they didn't really mean it.
Keep this in mind if you need to develop such a character.

This is similar to how using "ur" instead of your or you're, usually represents a below average young person who texts a lot. Not always though. It could also be a man in his 50s who wants to seem cool to young people or a hipster who is doing it to be "ironic".

Studying people will allow you to generate profiles which can help make more authentic characters.

I do not recommend taking time off. Get back up and try again. Also figure out how many words you should be generating in a month. This came across as very short for "months of work". Try book format first, then adapt when you find an artist. I think you will find describing everything helps you feel your world and characters.

If you are going to take a vacation I recommend a little reading. Connect your kindle or phone to the local library and ready all the different colored fairy books (ED. The Red Fairy Book)as well as East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and the brothers Grimm. These will give you foundation as to where things in stories come from. I do not need to mention Greek stuff since it sounds like you already have some Greek history under your belt..

Again make your own names. No anime/manga character I can think of becomes famous wearing someone else's over used name name. Gilgamesh.. blech!
If you are going to use famous names, use only 1. You may be able to get by with Ajax as a character but Ajax, Paris, and Achilles go adventuring is going to get flagged unless it is a story about the original characters going adventuring.
If you are going to use 1 name do an internet search for it and see if it is getting used in anything right now. Talos is in the name of a very popular video game right now (Talos Principle).
My mother once had to change a family name in one of her books, when her agent pointed out that her family name "Harkoon" was way to close to the famous "Harkonnen" family name of Dune fame. It can happen to anyone.

WELL I didn't even get the chance tobhelp you rework it. Or see what you can do to fix it.

What kind of story do you want to make?

Lol sorry, I did delete it all. I want to make a story that feels epic. Just so you know, Johny, that doesn't mean I plan to have every moment be intense and epic. Lol (I hope my Lols bother you). I would like to have moments where the characters are just living their lives too. I want to make a story that has an impact on people (Johny, don't you dare tell me that I'm naive or some ****) I chuckled IRL (Because LOL means I'm trying to be passive).

I always recommend to focus on one story with one theme and wait until you finish the first one before deciding if the world you create is accessible.

Now Talos trying to create a country in a world without civilization Sounds very reminiscent of Elders Scroll of Talos uniting the nations into one Empire.

I highly recommend breaking your ideas down and looking at which are the most important a and which aren't. Once you do and see which ones counteract then you can decide what to focus on more.

Honestly writing is about a lot of things but if you can choose the right themes, and choose which ones to focus on the most, and figure out how you will present it to your readers, then things suddenly start making more sense.


I recommend posting your chapters here rather than Google docs. Its a pain to really handle, and writing isn't to the point of having to fear plagiarism.

Thank you, I'll use docs to organize my themes and ideas. And I'll post my chapters here. I just thought the commenting and recommendation features in docs is really neat and useful.

Lol sorry, I did delete it all. I want to make a story that feels epic. Just so you know, Johny, that doesn't mean I plan to have every moment be intense and epic. Lol (I hope my Lols bother you). I would like to have moments where the characters are just living their lives too. I want to make a story that has an impact on people (Johny, don't you dare tell me that I'm naive or some ****) I chuckled IRL (Because LOL means I'm trying to be passive).

it feels like a video game what you are describing. But you are also being very vague.

A story has to have a purpose. It doesn't have to really teach us something completely new but it does have to share a perspective. I think a lot of times making stories feel "epic" is a bad thing. The idea of an epic story means creating a story that is vast and open. The problem with these type of stories is that they end up being so vast they lose logic and reason or don't define them properly. Or it loses it's purpose.

So I recommend starting off with something simple and slowly adding onto it.