They were coming to the bakery for the open-sky experience. The net ruined that for people.
I think I managed to pinpoint another reason why Garsow ultimately choosing to stay in the alternate reality doesn't feel natural — his behaviour doesn't seem to change much throughout the story, and he constantly treats this universe as something distant to him, not necessarily a home where he belongs in but something curious and fascinating. Until the end, of course.
Try to picture yourself being here. It has that nice lakeside fresh air. There's lots of wildlife making noise, and the waves are splashing against the bank.
This kind of foreshadowing does help a lot, but it's hindered by the immediately following;
I'll be back home before long. We had a lot of good times, didn't we? I remember we'd sit by lakes like this one. They were boring normal lakes, but those times were just as unreal.
Which recontextualizes the previous sentence as nostalgia for his own universe rather than a desire to stay in the new one.
"I AM ZUKU, GOD OF WEATHER!"
I //personally/ [IMO] (in my opinion) don't like Zuku. Up until his appearance the entire world has a sense of surrealism with colourful, ridiculous characteristics that also serve as humor. Zuku ruins this subtlety by being a very loud character that belongs in a different, more ridiculous and less surreal story. He feels like a Togetic/Tarbolin character that's airdropped by the end of the second act of The Room.
My complaints as to how the GD feels out of place have been addressed, but I still feel like it's missing something. A suggestion: how about expanding the scene where he first appears a little? Maybe have a little transcript or description of the conversation he's having. At this point this specific complaint feels more and more like a nitpick, but maybe it'll help you improve the article in the future.
Document RPC-013-17
My feelings toward this (now somewhat less) abrupt turn remain. It still feels like a very sudden change of pace, but now at least there's some foreshadowing to it. Similar feel toward Garkuk's dialogue — too preachy, too wooden.
All of these could maybe be improved if there was a more evident sense of progression that connected each collapsible. As of now it feels more like a series of events that have an order, but are too independent to make a story.
With this in mind, I'll be voting negative. Despite the excellent imagery and media, I don't feel comfortable upvoting what feels like an inferior version of something that could be — if you make significant changes to this, either during and after the contest, I'll be happy to reread and reevalue my vote: I haven't really stated during crit how much I believe this could be great.
In any case, I'm sorry if my crit before this point was too vague or unhelpful or whatever for you to change the article based on it.
A sore city that deserves sepulture under quadruple the ice. That dump overbrims with dark, upright grimalkin. I lost my antennae over some corrupt, colloguing star.
i will now destroy failsafe and below zero before this reference comes to mean anything