So let me just begin by saying that I find the act of leaving someone at the alter to be one of the shittiest moves a human being can make. The fact that this was an arranged marriage in this case makes things slightly better, but I’d still argue that to make both your fiancée and both sets of friends/families go through all the trouble of planning and attending a wedding only to suddenly turn around and basically go, “Nah,” is such a douchey thing to do. It’s fine to change your mind or wish to rescue someone from a loveless marriage, but you should at least have the guts to do that before the big day.
That being said, I’m intrigued to see where this story is going. Here’s hoping that the two characters manage to become somewhat less one-note and caricature-esque as time goes on.
That's like saying that it'd have been for Luke to take a lightsabre and go kill the Evil Emperor on a Death Star. We got a hero with the means, an evil bad guy and a superweapon; now we can have them fight it out and all is well. Everything else is surplus to the story and a waste of time.
And if the author really just needed that much they could have done it in 5 pages. Or maybe 2. One before the marriage and one for them running away at the altar. And I'd probably would have seen that as more legitimate since although I don't like it it's often that first a conflict is established and then afterwards we get to learn what lead up to it and so on. But here we're starting out chronologically so I expect the author to also actually do something with the build up.
But, whatever. Clearly we won't agree. I think this chapter was pretty awful - some others seem to agree - you don't, and some others also don't.
I agree with you, this chapter was pretty bad, but I would argue that it did not need more chapters to precede the objection simply because a girl rescuing her longtime friend from a loveless marriage is not supposed to be the main point of the story, it’s supposed to be about what happens afterwards, and how it (hopefully) changes them for the the better. This chapter is more of a prologue, which means it need only introduce the characters and their situation, without dipping into the actual story. The problems with it are that a) the main characters aren’t terribly likable, and b) the story moves too quickly for the chapter. If the author had removed just one extraneous bit: the flashbacks, the scene at the office, the burning hair, it would have told us just as much about the characters without appearing as disjointed.
