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Hubay – Lord domestic Ch 16


Hubay

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Hey all, if I remember correctly my big concern with this chapter was that the exposition not seem excessive, unrealistic, or too sudden. It's 3000 words (L,V, S), and is all about Jhuz finally meeting the Chell. Enjoy!

Edit: If anyone else has a critique for this, I'm just curious – do the Chell's motivations make sense? If they don't quite yet, are you willing to wait a little longer to see if they do? They're very old, and they have a lot of power over humanity, and that affects their decision making process quite a bit. There's a little more to it than that – it's related to how Chell are Chell – but that's very much a RAFO at this point.

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Good chapter with a good number of reveals. I get your concern about the amount of things you reveal, since basically the whole chapter is devoted to explaining the motivations of the Chell. You might be able to do away with some when you get to writing Lisu’s chapters, since she already seems to know the Chell and you can reveal some of these things through her chapters.

Some of the reveals the Chell give Jhuz felt a bit like the villain explaining his master plan since the hero is obviously captured and going to die – or in Jhuz’s case, forget all about it. If so, explaining things to Jhuz has no meaning, instead wouldn’t the Chell have finished their argument without dragging Jhuz, who they see as a pawn, into it? Despite that I liked what the Chell revealed, such as how Jhuz’s perspective and what he thinks he knows about the Chell is obviously circumspect now. Real nice, I wasn’t expecting that.

What I also like about the Chell is how ironic their motivations are. They fault the humans for warring amongst themselves and destroying each other, only the bonds of the Chell keep the humans in line. But from what I see the Chell bicker amongst themselves and would readily destroy each other if it weren’t for the gods holding their leashes. The gods sounds really interesting though, I wouldn’t mind reading more about them or seeing them show up on the scene.

During the initial argument between the Chell I missed Jhuz’s perspective on what he was seeing. Emotionally there’s a big leap between “These are the Chell” and “Jhuz couldn’t take it anymore”.

I liked the trick Grishka played on Nivel, saying he’s not a true Chell, which allowed Jhuz to manipulate the geas. Maybe not the smartest thing to show Jhuz how he can get around geases, but I can see how an ages old entity like Grishka is arrogant enough to demonstrate a weakness and believe he won’t fall prey to it in the end. Also, how he freed Jhuz is suitably gruesome.

Hex’s tenets make a little bit more sense to me now, as they are obviously a derivative of the Chellic laws all the races have to follow. The small reveals about how Lisu killed the ambassador don’t mean much to me, since we haven’t seen her perspective yet and Jhuz has no thoughts on this as Grishka reveals it.

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It was nice to finally see more of the Chell. This was a chapter I had been waiting to see for a long time.

Now, I'm not sure I quite understood each Chell faction's motivations. The bad Chell for instance say that they want the humans to fend for themselves, but they keep tipping the balance towards chaos, which kind of negates the non interference premise.

You were worried that we got too many exposition here : this is not a bad thing to have in a reveal chapter, but as Asmodemon said, the Chell's motivations for explaining all their plans simply didn't work. I understand that they think they can babble before the humans, since they won't remember a thing, but would they really talked to one another like that if they had been alone?

I liked the introduction of the gods. The Chell look after the humans, the gods look after the Chell. That was neat. Now, I would have liked some foreshadowing of the gods existence (and Hex's belief that he's working for a god isn't enough, as he doesn't talk like his god really exists).

It was actually nice to see that humans have a little bit of free will even when under a Chell's compulsion. As the commands seem to be only verbal, that leaves much room for individual interpretation, which Grishka uses well. I hope to see more things like that in the next chapters.

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Thanks for the feedback, both of you! If it help clear things up a little, Grishka is not a 'bad' chell, persay, so the reason he explained things was because he thought Jhuz deserved a tiny bit of the truth. He also wants Hex to know about the geas because Jhuz will obviously forget. He does look at humans as a kind of animal by this point, but he still wants to be nice to them.

The Palehands – the bad guys here – are monsters. There's a specific reason why they're as cruel as they are, but I won't get into that in Jhuz's storyline. They're using the debate as a pretense to just cause a lot of destruction. They want the other faction – the one that thinks humanity needs to be ruled – to win, but they aren't actually part of it. So they're more than happy with cheating at the argument by causing wanton death and destruction.

I'll try to make the good/evil more obvious; I think that will make their actions make more sense.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Well, I'm starting to get caught up.

Overall, I liked this chapter (and the last). Some of the reveals do seem a bit sudden, but I'm willing to wait for the other viewpoints before saying that for sure. There was a good chunk of exposition, but I didn't think it ran too long. I would echo Asmodemon's thoughts that it would be nice to be more thoroughly grounded in Jhuz's perspective in the chapter, and get his emotions more evenly throughout. As it is, it seems like we see some stuff happen, then Jhuz has an emotional reaction, then he calms and stuff happens, etc. Of course, this could be the Chell manipulating him.... If that's the case, it will be tougher to show those emotions.

Edit: If anyone else has a critique for this, I'm just curious – do the Chell's motivations make sense? If they don't quite yet, are you willing to wait a little longer to see if they do? They're very old, and they have a lot of power over humanity, and that affects their decision making process quite a bit. There's a little more to it than that – it's related to how Chell are Chell – but that's very much a RAFO at this point.

In answer to this, they make enough sense that I can try to guess at how they might be acting behind the scenes. I fully expect some of those guesses to be wrong, as well. Right now, I'm willing to RAFO for them.

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