10/17/16 - Waning, ch. 4 (V*)

[neongrey]

Yeah, realistically speaking, I think the makeup has to be there. It's two and a half paragraphs and they're not long ones; the actual prose can probably use some work but I don't think it's wasting a lot of space. I think it's important both as the setting point of establishing the ubiquity of cosmetics on males even this young (since just dropping it in before didn't seem to go over well) and as the character point that Thalan here would literally rather use someone else's stuff without permission than go without.

The rest, hmm, I'll take a look at. I made sure to hit the name and unique descriptors for the clothing early on for that; I think what I want there is to get 2-3-4 looked at within the same reading session to see how that comes off.

That second conversation will definitely need a looking-over, I think, yeah.

Savae's lack of resources is a majour restriction, yeah, but they've got a lot of personal capabilities. Makes for some interesting constraints.

It's interesting, though; when people do accidentally misgender Savae, they really do go with 'he' most often. When I do it, it's pretty much always 'she'...heh.

[Robinski he/him]

Nice to be on new ground. Comments.

• Another good epigraph, and I like the chapter title. Thal threw me for the first couple of lines, but I’m on-board and see how this relates and resonates with the chapter title, I think. I was troubled at first by another POV so soon, but I don’t see how else you would have conveyed this notion of…, and I’ll get the term wrong here no doubt, so my apologies, but… shifting gender? I don’t exactly know what’s happening, but I'm not asking for an explanation, I’ll go with it.

• “pale brown hair falling daggedly against their cheeks” – Huh? What this mean?

• I enjoyed the first section and came to terms well enough, I think, with the shift between Kath and Thal – I enjoyed the imagery there and how you presented Thal’s thoughts.

• “That anyone knows there's a 'you' to look for. And I think there very much is not.” – Something off here, I feel. I think this phrasing follows a different prior phrase about ‘someone looking for Thal’ – compared with something like ‘That anyone knows there's a 'you' to look for. And I don’t think anyone does.’

• “No one will look for you, not out of any particular lack of concern for you, but because if anyone knew to look for you, they'd know to look for whomever architected that plan.” – First underline for consistency, but second… well, I just hate that. I don’t mean to upset you, but that’s not a verb, and I’ve glided past a few ‘new’ words, but I can’t get past this. Sav goes to the grammatical bother of saying ‘whom’ than says ‘architected’? (humph).

• I find the dialogue around Sav’s question about bringing down an empire confusing. Not the sentiment or the direction, but the detail and some of the grammar. These make the flow muddy, imho. I don’t see a reason for this passage of discussion to be unclear. I think it could be much more elegant and smooth. I don’t really follow the stuff about giving this answer or that answer.

• The last line comes out of nowhere for me, this bit about destroying the canal. Was that foreshadowed? I missed it if it is was.

Lots of good stuff in this chapter, but also stuff that left me dissatisfied. Phrasing and grammar as just that, but my main gripe was Sav’s attitude to Thal. Why on earth would he want to help her bring down a society, just because he happens to be standing in front of her? And, despite being in his POV, we don’t’ get much sense of his reaction to this at all, somehow that feels like a bit of a swindle.

Apropos of not much, I have sympathy at this point for Las but not for Sav, perhaps because I’m not really seeing (or getting) her agenda and motivations to do what she’s doing in striking against the Ael.

<R>

p.s. - Reading some of the other comments, I don’t see an issue with the length of the descriptions. I found Thal rumination on clothes and make-up useful to help me adjust to the ‘gender malleability’ (sorry, I don’t have the language) that I was seeing on the page.

p.p.s - I see that the second conversation is something that you had the crosshairs at the time. I definitely agree.

[neongrey]

12 hours ago, Robinski said:

“pale brown hair falling daggedly against their cheeks” – Huh? What this mean?

in a series of points.

12 hours ago, Robinski said:

I don’t mean to upset you, but that’s not a verb, and I’ve glided past a few ‘new’ words, but I can’t get past this. Sav goes to the grammatical bother of saying ‘whom’ than says ‘architected’? (humph).

'architect' is absolutely a verb and has been used as such since at least the early 1800s. First known citation is a letter from Keats, as it happens.

That said, one should always been incredibly wary of such pronouncements that something isn't a word, and not just for the reasons given in that blog post-- incepting a word where one did not formerly exist is quite literally how language works. In this case, the connotation of purposeful and explicit construction, that does not have a derogatory implication to the one who created the plan, that suitable for use in an informal-polite conversation in ways that 'created' (lacking the sense of deliberation), 'hatched' or 'schemed' (negative implication), 'spearheaded' (suggests a more direct action than appropriate, not within register for the conversation), 'devised' (more cunning than I'm needing)-- all of this is satisfied by 'architected' in a way that is not readily satisfied by other worse, and 'architected' does satisfy these needs in a clear way; there is no obfuscation as to the meaning.

Basically, one shouldn't have to cite Keats or the OED in order to justify one's usage of a term with a clear meaning used in an appropriate manner. Linguistic perscriptivism is a cancer that strangles language.

 

12 hours ago, Robinski said:

The last line comes out of nowhere for me, this bit about destroying the canal. Was that foreshadowed? I missed it if it is was.

In fact, this line is the foreshadowing.

Otherwise, yeah, this one in particular is definitely a problem chapter-- Savae in general has been plagued by plot issues. I've cracked the nut now, but especially over here, boy howdy were there problems.

Edited February 6, 2017 by neongrey