3/25/24 - Ace of Hearts - Everlasting Sunset sub 20, V (3533)

[Ace of Hearts]

Hi everyone,

 

Thanks for the feedback last week, and I'm glad to hear that the submission read well! At this point we're getting into the climax of part 2, so I'm curious to see how it comes across.

 

Thanks as always!

[Silk she/her]

“This is the person who killed S.” Have we established that? Did anyone actually see who killed him? Or are they just guessing and letting themselves be driven by emotion? I think the latter is actually a really fun and effective way to explore the emotional impact of what happened last chapter, just need a bit more clarity here on how much that's actually happening.

P3 “Xan said out loud” as opposed to over A’s earpiece, I sppose? It took me a moment to track why we needed to specify “out loud.”

I am losing track of the talk about the numbered bases. Could be WRS but I don’t remember there being much discussion about specifically numbered bases.

P4 “B had taken credit… only after A mentioned it” Arguably, the same thing has just happened here with M, since M was being vague enough that she could have just been fishing for info.

“I needed you to see the truth beneath J’s veil of peace…” the truth being that the soldiers are treated poorly—information we had already? It feels like this scene is a reveal, but I’m not fully sure what the reveal is.

P6 “She’s taking control of the conversation.” I mean yes, but she’s basically been controlling the conversation this whole time.

p7 “…to see C monsters advancing, humanoid ones.” Are they advancing through the structure—isn’t it fortified? Are we looking out into the ocean? B’s reaction seems to indicate the threat is fairly immediate, A’s reaction less so.

                Edit: Ah, we get some more details on page 8. I wonder if we could get this sooner, and a bit more of the physical scene, I’m still feeling a bit lost.

So… what purpose did the monster attack serve?

Overall: As always, I remain interested to see where this is going. I’m still having trouble tracking the intrigue, and the chapter felt a little long and unfocused to me – we watched A work through a bunch of different scenarios and doubts in her head, but I felt like I didn’t really have enough information about any of the possibilities to get invested in one over another. Plus, the cycles of doubt before and after the monster attack felt fairly similar.

The biggest question I have is about what characters like M and B want. I don’t have to know exactly what they want or why either of them is doing what they’re doing, but aside from the partial reveal about who’s actually on whose side here, I don’t feel like I understand that much better now than I did when the characters were introduced.

[Mandamon he/him]

Some similar thoughts to @Silk on this. I was glad to finally get some explanation for things, but I think a lot of it got lost in the meantime. I was also confused on the base numbering, as well as what the attackers were, and all the machinations going on with B and M. I think it worked in the end, but we need some more buildup before now to make the emotional payoff work in this chapter. There were a couple new things introduced here we could have had some more information on before now.

Interested to see where this is going!

 

Notes while reading:

pg 3: I don't know or remember the base numberings, so I'm not sure which is which.

pg 5: There's a lot of machinations here, and I'm not sure I'm getting all of them, probably because of WRS.

pg 5: "bound to any console"
--Is this a thing? I'm not sure what this means. Are the soldiers all bound to the one console A was using, or does this mean each one has a console?

pg 8: "Her soldiers engaged the waves of Calamity soldiers "
--Not sure I get this. I thought they were monsters? Mostly they've been fish so far. If this is a big change that the monsters now seem like soldiers, this probably needs a little unpacking.

pg 8: The description of the attack here doesn't really work because we haven't had a description of the attackers.

pg 9: definitely need more description of what they're facing.

pg 11: I thought something was weird about B.

pg 13: Okay, yeah, B has been super sus the whole time to the reader, so much I was wondering what was going on with her.

pg 13: "a powerful psion, on the level of the imperials that could annihilate islands with a snap of their fingers"
--Do we know who these are? Have we encountered them before?