by Kyunji » Thu Feb 15, 2007 8:51 pm
To be honest... These are pretty mediocre. I don't do caption images, so it may be that I don't have a right to speak on the subject, but here are the problems I see with your captions:
First, they're very heavy-handed. Captions that're just a picture of a cute girl with an accompanying sentence or two that more or less says, "I'm a girl now, and I'm happy/sad" get repetitive quickly. This is made even worse when a caption character states something obvious or unrealistic. When I say "unrealistic", I mean "people not acting like people". No one is really so straightforward in their speech so as to say, "I'll never pass the exam for the woman's history class to get my manhood back." The former boy in your first caption knows very well what his situation is, and there's no way that she would randomly decide to repeat it out loud. Think about how you would react to the situation you put your characters in. At most, a very exasperated person might just sigh and mutter, "Damn women's history class."
That doesn't explain the point of the image very well, though, does it? Here lies what is, in my experience, one of the many challenges of short captions: communicating a concept without resorting to crude dialog or plain narration. These two storytelling methods make captions feel cheap and boring. I recommend that you do your best to find ways of telling stories without being so explicit.
Another issue is that your ideas are generic. Yes, you're a beginning captioner, and I acknowlege that. Nevertheless, your captions don't have much to them and don't add anything to the images they're based off of. The captions only work with what's in the image, only adding small elements of TG to them. How did these boys get to be in their current situations? What might happen to them next? Try to find interesting explanations instead of typing the first thing that comes into your head.
Finally, avoid clichés. Ever since the dawn of TG fiction, it seems that authors have used several of the same old, tired stereotypes. One of the most common ones is "[male name], now [female name]", and by extension "he, now she". I assure you that anyone who has visited the site for more than five minutes has almost certainly seen this line used by now. Please, please, please try to avoid it and other clichés. Otherwise, your image loses much of its originality. Some other no-nos include, "'I disrespected a woman, so now I have to live as one!'" and "'I don't understand women...' ZAP! 'Whoops, now I'm a girl!'"
So as I said, your images aren't great. The primary thing to worry about is originality. Caption images are all about being original. I'm even skipping my usual complaints about grammar to emphasize this. Think outside the pixel boundries.
