I found early on that, like Destructionator, I ended up rooting for the Demons and Angels instead of the humans. Like when Uriel attacks someplace part of me is actually cheering him on and going "go man, kill everybody, make them bleed!" The whole thing is just so predictable, it's just so obvious the humans are going to win, that I want to see them get bloodied. And I mean really bloodied, not just Belial killing some few tens of thousands of random people with a sky volcano, but, like, an actual strategically significant defeat for us. I'd just love to have something happen to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the good guys' total victory isn't completely inevitable. As it is, it's just so obvious the bad guys stand no chance that I can't work up much enthusiasm for cheering on at what is obviously a slaughter in which the outcome is never actually in doubt.
Personally I find it interesting to compare Armageddon to
A Dystopic Return of Magic, as it's got a similar premise (evil mythical beings return to Earth to find humans are now not as helpless as they expected thanks to technology), but actually manages to pull it off right. The villains are genuinely scary and even though you have a sense of inevitable human victory the villains are still capable of doing real damage and inflicting horrible suffering on humanity so you actually have an emotional investment in how the battles turn out, and you have characters that you really care about and you feel really bad about them when they die in shitty ways, and they actually do die in shitty ways (pretty much no character you actually care about dies in Armageddon - except in the sense they die and just respawn in Hell like a video game character). When the Fey in that story attack some place I have real emotional investment in wanting them to lose and not wanting them to be able to inflict their horrible tortures on the helpless inhabitants. When someplace in Armageddon gets attacked by Demons or Angels my response is "meh, Bronze Age throwbacks attacking someplace, may be allowed to do token damage and kill a few people (who will probably just respawn like video game characters so no big deal), sure to get their asses kicked up between their shoulders, more at 5:30." Now, I'm not saying the situation in Armageddon has to be as grimdark as the one in that story*, but an actual sense that we really are under threat would be nice.
* Although if you think about it the basic premise of Armageddon is pretty goddamn grimdark. You don't really feel it in the story (one of the many examples of what I'm talking about), but if you think about it, it means almost everybody who ever died got to look forward to being tortured in Hell, in most cases probably after a life on Earth that was fairly lousy already. Sure, they
eventually will all be rescued when Hell is liberated ... after anywhere from years to millenia of constant horrible torture (maybe even millions of years if pre-human hominids went to Hell, which is implied at one point). Holy moley is that a downer to contemplate.
Speaking of which, part of it may be the author of
A Dystopic Return of Magic is way better at making the horrible tortures inflicted on the villains' victims sound actually scary. Reading Armageddon the torments of Hell seem to be about as easy to recover from as a hangover. People get their extremities melted off in boiling oil and then afterward they seem to be just fine, with no indications of being the PTSD-riddled haunted men who scream in their sleep that you'd think would actually come out of an experience like that. If Stuart was only as good at making Hell seem awful as RTCFI is at making being captured by the Fey seem awful, changing nothing else, Armageddon would have gotten much more emotional investment from me.
Of course I forgot it's supposed to be a character-focused mockumentary so all these complaints are missing the point. This
excuse reasoning would carry more weight with me if I actually had a sense that characters I cared about were in real danger. You get a little of that in the beginning of Armageddon but once Hell ceases to be a place where your ass will bleed it pretty much disappears completely. Like I said, when it comes to characters I actually care about it I can't remember a single one that actually died (as in, died died, not died and got to respawn big deal), and while a handful of them had horrible things happen to them in Hell the author is bad at impressing on us the horror they've actually gone through so it turns out sort of meh, big deal.
Ford Prefect wrote:Honestly, the idea of Michael being a drug dealer, of all things, strikes me as being purely to 'discredit' Heaven as a really serious threat. The angels are all junkies? Are you fucking kidding me?
Like much of Armageddon/Pantheocide the idea that the Angels in Heaven are turning to drugs, alcohol, and other deadening sensual indulgence to escape the fact that Heaven is actually a repressive shithole is (IMO) really interesting in concept. The problem is the execution is not very good. That's pretty much the problem with the whole story. Virtually everything in Armageddon and Pantheocide would sound awesome in a synopsis, the problem is in the translation from idea to fully fleshed out story.
Maybe if I was more serious about writing and actually really wanted to become a published writer I ... probably wouldn't post my shit on SDN anyway.