neongrey

Harry Potter has faced this delegitimization in genre basically as long as it's existed for three big reasons, really: a) It's written for children and later moves into YA. Things written for children are far easier to write off as being less important or of lesser quality as works of both art and craft, Art is somewhat subjective, but I will note that in terms of craft it's really hard to put together something that grabs children in this manner. YA too struggles with people dismissing its validity. b ) It's written by a woman. Joanna Russ went over this one pretty well, I think. This invalidation is rarely anymore a result of conscious 'well i'm gonna delegitimize a woman today', but it doesn't have to be conscious in order to have real, measurable effects. c) It's popular. It's popular in ways that Martin (the only really comparable fantasy author re: mainstream appeal in this moment) could only dream of and is so thoroughly embedded into the public consciousness that even people who aren't 'fans' are familiar with details that in other circumstances would be considered minute. And that popularity serves quite frequently as a way of dismissing potential value-- I think we're all familiar with the ways geekery generally gets annoyed when 'their' things become 'mainstream'. There's plenty of reasons not to like Harry Potter (I'm very very much not a fan) but its place in the genre? I don't think it can legitimately be denied.

So what exactly doesn't qualify a boy going to a wizard school, learning to become a wizard, and defeating an evil that's loomed over his people for decades as fantasy? The fact that it's not secondary-world fantasy? Does Gaiman's work not count as fantasy? Does the majority of the urban fantasy genre not count as fantasy?

Managed to get through both Fifth Season (definitely where my Hugo vote is going; the only other that I've read to completion was Uprooted which, while not bad at all, struck me as kind of pedestrian) and Too Like the Lightning (same, I think, but for next year; be quite surprised if it doesn't land on the ballot) during my brief time on vacation. Fifth Season sure was a trip; it did my absolute least favourite thing ever that you can do with a POV but by the end it sure had me going 'it absolutely had to be this way'. I phrase circuitously because spoilers, of course. Both really hard for me to get into, but once I had the time with not much else to do, they both made me really glad I put in the effort.

Well, I'm back early from vacation-- shall I inflict number 8 on everyone next week? See if I can take a look at what everyone's passed around this week too, since i've got more time with internet access than I expected to have this week.

Oh yeah, sorry, this slipped my mind-- by all means, yes. gonna have severely intermittent internet connection for the next weekish and mobile only, so I won't be around much... I am sure that everything will be much happier when I am back.

I'm way behind on my listening but it sounds like a good episode. The thing is though, when it comes to this particular implicit bias within the context of crit, I am neither prepared to nor capable of being the intro gender studies pinata. nor do I think it appropriate to assume that this should be obligatory. Neither does being a vegetarian obligate one to explain what a vegetable is at every turn-- and someone who continued to insist that being a vegetarian renders one inherently an ambassador of vegetarian-ness beyond that vegetarian's willingness to do so is not behaving appropriately, either. There is a wealth of resources that exist: the fact that an individual chooses not to be one should not be odious. Neither has the text been silent on this subject prior to this point, or rather: this has very consistently and intentionally been written as normative, as has being disdainful of the species while at the same time not batting an eyelash at the ungendered form-- eg, where Ilea Sirie is overtly contemptuous of Savae's religion, and more subtly contemptuous of both their build and their own species' attitude toward, perhaps, the need for a binder, both she and her student don't budge on the ungendered forms. Honorifics presented use trinary forms, and when Lasila seeks clarification on a set she hasn't used in years, they come in a set of three; similarly we've encountered the trinary form elsewhere (ilia/ilien/ilie). So, a paragraph where the viewpoint character looks at a person, notates conflicting gender presentation markers (in this case, wide hips and a flat chest), and selects an ungendered form is not exactly out of nowhere textually. Never mind that this is the sort of thing I consider basic real-world politeness. And, like, if someone says something you're doing is causing harm, maybe, you know, believe them?

If I thought you were ill-intentioned, I wouldn't be here to have a conversation with. My point is that you don't need to be ill-intentioned to do harm, and coming down again on the 'no, really, why don't you misgender this character' after I've already made clear that this is really not an appropriate line to take in crit (and about this exact paragraph!) is really more than I'm willing to deal with in this particular context, if only because it carries with it the implicit promise that this isn't going to stop. The sole facts that I'm writing a story with a major nonbinary character (and in an implied tri-gendered language) and am personally a few degrees off the binary do not obligate me to be an educator on the subject of the basics of de-binarying gender-- as I've said, I don't have the capacity to do this. Like, we're extremely lucky to have someone like Kaisa who is willing and able to go over this, because if it was just me, I would have to leave you to Google's tender mercies. But here's something I can convey: if a text assumes a correct gender for a given character, it is offensive to suggest that an incorrect gender be assumed in the text instead. This does not obligate offense in anyone, but someone failing to be offended by this is not a signifier that a person who is offended is either in the wrong or overreacting by doing so. Please realize that people who deal with this sort of thing probably get this a whole lot, and even if in a vaccuum something is fairly minor, these things pile up until the last straw hits. Like, I can explain the particulars of Savae's situation, and I can tell you how the societies in question address this beyond what the text proper will cover, but when it comes down to the point of repeatedly having to deal with 'why isn't the wrong gender being assumed here', that's not the sort of comment that is engaging with the text, it's the sort of comment that's engaging with the commenter's own implicit assertion that gender must be binary and that's not something I'm prepared to deal with.

I'm not wholly opposed to them, so I really appreciate the thought... I'll need a complete draft period though before I can even get there, haha. Really, I have no illusions about how people in general are over this sort of thing, I just take exception to the need to deal with this in an informal setting after having asked to not. I expect people to get weirded out a bit more as certain particulars of aelin marriage contracts come up and that, I think, will be unavoidable.

Yeah, my frustration here is that I personally have neither the temperament nor the interest in educating on these things (it should say something that the power fantasy I am writing is an outgoing people person; I can't even look directly at other people at all, let alone the eye), and man, having this come up so often-- after expressing my own discomfort every time it does-- is really wearing. Like I am not ascribing malice here but it doesn't have to be malicious for it to be a cumulative problem for me. I always, always assume crit is made in good faith, but where an evisceration of a work is a case where that good faith matters, that assumption makes less difference to me when it comes down to it. I am not comfortable coming up against this at every possible opportunity. I don't wanna walk over this, I have gotten a lot of valuable notes for my work through this, and I hope others would say the same about me, but I am kind of at the end of my rope on this and if it does keep up, I have to look at what's best for me personally. I don't expect full awareness, but, like, I don't think I am being unreasonable when I ask people to lay off on the subject. Like, man, Savae has a nude scene in 11, I do not want to have to explain binders or answer questions about their boobs, or whatever, not in the context of me requesting crit.

I think this will probably be alleviated some by the earlier bit, but yeah it's not an even split (nor is it terribly supposed to be, mind, but it should still be a little smoother than this). Yeah, I suspect a lot of this section's gonna need an axe taken to the prose; this part is quite rough and I'm stretching not enough to fill in the space I have here, and relying far too much on my references. More focus on what Lasila's deriving from the observation and less on straight translation of what she sees. Certainly, it might be construed as suspicious. Indeed we do, and we were quite explicitly told by someone with a measure of authority that anyone in such a colour is a fool-- red is the preferred colour of the night, being one the goddess favours. She did make an assumption here. She will not be misgendering Savae, and if this sort of suggestion is going to keep coming up from people, I'm honestly going to have to stop submitting. It's the sort of comment that says a lot more about the reader than the text and I become increasingly less personally comfortable presenting my unedited first drafts in such company every time it occurs. Encountering this sort of nonsense may well be an inevitability later on in the lifetime of the MS, but I have no interest in dealing with that at this time. Just please realize that every 'wouldn't this person assume the wrong gender for this character' is mildly transphobic (binarist, perhaps, in this case?), and it does offend me as it stacks up, both seeing it here and on others' works-- think it if you must, but as critique it is not something that I am going to derive anything useful from. Yeah, this slice has already seen some continuity massage for clarity, but this bit seems to have been missed. She's inexperienced but interested and yeah, this has been mentioned both previously and will be coming up again shortly. Indeed-- but it's bold here to be not showing much off, to have not done much with the hair. Should be clearer, yeah. This would be hyperbole used for the purposes of teasing. There's a consistent style followed here-- if it's in reference to the family (see: 'of house Vahendra') house isn't capitalized. If it's a business entity (see: the dress was made by House Sirie) it's capitalized. Yeah, as I've said before-- this is noted but isn't presently reflected in this first draft until 12 or so. Savae is rather off-kilter at best. Yeah, I've got one more Savae going in before the current first pov, which should also clarify what they're up to here. Much as I'd prefer to keep this to one POV, Savae as POV mandatory if I don't want this text to look like it's in agreement with Lasila's procapitalist white feminism. Neither one of them is reliable in the slightest, FWIW. Yeah, this would be covered by the previous Savae POV. Good notes all through this paragraph; there's a reason why it's fairly human food which is not going to be overtly stated but it's much why Savae has an aelin-language name, and should be clearly derivable as Savae's POV sections go on. (it's that little empire business Senator Melqueth is on about). But I'll certainly rethink the selections here-- I was a bit scattershot with the references I was pulling from. Yeah, there's a few things going on here-- one is that Elarin (the bodyguard, we'll get her name shortly, just easiest to use it here lol) is somewhat unconstrained by normal societal rules for reasons which will be implied if not obvious (and certainly she's not escaping comment). Rienri's comments here-- yeah, could use some rework; it's actually supposed to be much more unconsciously patronizing like that, there's a large aspect of 'wouldn't that be cute if you did that'. Thanks lots! Now, to work, and then packing, and hopefully I can get at least one more of these subs read before I have to go...

Even better, I'm at the lake all next week so I'm not putting in, so you will in fact need to wait for Iluya's wandering hands (unless you peek ahead, I suppose, lol) If it makes you feel better, Senator Melqueth almost certainly whisked Eshrin away for... not just a talk. Iluya is somewhat of a delight; one might or might not notice yet that it's actually her house's sign which this story is named for. Not intentional but I wouldn't call it wrong, either. Thanks; yeah, in this case for this character I'd much rather rework the sentences that don't fall out right than go with a neopronoun, and I do my best to catch all the odd ones but you never can quite get every one by yourself, haha. I think that particular reframe won't work because Savae is making a more generalized observation but I think I can come up with something there. (the fact that they are quite so fond of creme de violette, too, probably says something... ) Yeah, this could be clearer, that they're working their own magic here. Savae works pretty intuitively so they don't stop to explain much but the framing could work better. We will eventually be in the head of someone who works magic much more analytically, so partially I want this view of actual practice first. Hasn't come up in the past couple, but nothing terribly indirect (though some of the implications might not be outright stated)-- Lasila is waiting for the senate to open civil service examinations for women because she considers it the best opportunity for herself she can get, until she's able to reestablish trade under her family name; one of the other major religions in the city has largely been using influence to limit women ever since the god's mortal lover died in war and successfully kept them down for some time, etc-- all of this has been given some screen time thus far. But all this has been fraying quite a lot with attrition from the war-- your Rosie the Riveter types have come and gone and while society as a whole is becoming far more open to these notions, the laws and entrenched powers haven't exactly caught up yet, and class inequality is probably at an all-time high. So where Lasila isn't terribly personally restricted, she's certainly going to find herself coming up against these sorts of barrier a lot. Hmm, fair. I could do something else. Thanks!

p.1 I think 'pounds' would be better than 'is pounding'-- like before, passive voice. p.2 "The lobby of turner hospital' is, I think, a bit awkwardly phrased-- turner hospital's lobby, I think, would flow better. Either way, I think you want a capitalization on 'hospital' there also; you do so elsewhere. The description of the painting comes out off, structurally; "only the for the second clam" the typo on 'the' is obvious but I think starting the sentence with 'only' is making the paragraph flow a little choppy, and I'm not entirely sure what's going on with this sentence. For the following sentence-- I think you want 'sacs', not sacks? p.4 toward the bottom, typo with 'real seer' p.5 'I open the girl' the phrasing here is kind of ambiguous; I'm not 100% what you're intending here p.6 "is not dead" I think is a little too stilted-- "isn't dead", I think would carry better impact? p.7 "maybe it is the expression" I think it's would fit the register being used here a bit better p. 9 I do think it's a bit odd that Pascal's aunt is taking it so much in stride, visibly, that Oz is taking this test that's locked to women only? A sudden, last-minute change is pretty suspicious-- she's writing it off as nothing more than ordinary class politics but I dunno, that might be something that should set off more alarm bells. Nothing else leaping out-- I think this is some pretty good groundwork; I think this one is a lot of your breadcrumbing that we should be suspicious of the board? You're back on voice here too, more or less, but there's still some points of passive voice and uncontracted words that I think correction would help focus Oz's sound. But it's a decent breather.

The scene with Savae earlier will help with the talk Lasila overhears too-- it doesn't mean much to Lasila, but right now it's far more pertinent to Savae's plotline, though Lasila's swiftly pulling an analysis of the situation out is important too (she doesn't have much more basis than a first-time reader either, so she assembles it). That said, when I'm doing rework and the other scene is inserted there's deffo gonna be need to smoothing to make the pieces all fit. As for the other... this is actually somewhat of an 'I'm not writing erotica in this piece' sort of trick-- I can take the next scene, the one that opens off 8, much further by keeping everyone's clothes on. For now, anyway. But the lowering of borders is important here too. And too a certain degree of delicacy in handling is important; Lasila is two years underage and one of the youngest people at this event. This isn't going to stop her, but it must affect how I present the initial setup, before things start degenerating. This is something I have waffled back and forth on for a while for naming, though I think just for the purposes of allowing the reader relative comparison when I go back for rework I think it will do to make clearer that yeah, Envari is a nationality, but the people to whom it applies are human. It's not the first time the differences (beyond the wings) have come up, but it's only ever been in aside before, so missing them is not really a big deal. (most obviously, 'needs an architect, not a corsetier') While there's not a good way to get one in front of Lasila for her to make these comparisons prior to now, I think, again, the planned earlier Savae scene will also help provide this. She did make an assumption, the one that is present in the text. Savae will not be misgendered. Please don't suggest that this be done. Thanks for reading! I definitely think overall the other Savae scene will make a lot of difference here; just enough grease to get the wheels moving.

p.1 'somehow always' is kind of an awkward phrase, stacking modifiers ilke that. I think just 'always' would flow better there. I think that semicolon in the first paragraph might be best as a sentence break. p.2 The simile is framed a bit strangely here 'flowing around him like a river around'; in re meaning it works, but that around is repetitive that close together. 'brown as a board' I think is an odd comparison if only because wooden boards could be any number of different shades, and I'm not entirely sure how deep a shade you're intending by this. This desire is not all that nameless-- it might be that she's not willing to articulate it but it's pretty clear what that desire is; I might consider another descriptor? p.4 "Unfortunately, wizardry is almost useless..." this sentence feels kind of clunky-- part of it, I think, is that it's an out-of-place appendation to the prior statement; you know how people will say you can tell a lie by a person giving too much detail? That's kind of what this sentence feels like here to me. It's volunteering too much, beyond what is natural. If this story is going where I expect it is, that part is intentional. The other part of why I think this is stumbling here for me is that the phrasing is just sort of off. It's that starting 'unfortunately' and I think the 'have' after attempts which are doing the damage here. I think if you remove both you'll get a much more fluid sentence. I think changing the 'cannot' to 'can't' too in Chisa's response would work better too? It's more in the register she's using. p.5 As this conversation continues, I'm not all that sure I buy Chisa as 12; her vernacular is a bit more in the realm of 'jaded adult'. Bitter sarcasm is not something that generally kicks in young, at least not in phrasing-- even young with too many responsibilities. 'started to' lay into him feels a bit odd-- contextually I feel like 'was about to' is more what's actually happening here? And that's it for specific callouts that I have straight through to the end. I am very much a sucker for this sort of setting, and you quite deftly create a picture of the place in loose strokes; you're not working in a lot of space and you do a lot with it. If I have two issues, they're thus: - Chisa's voice, particularly in dialogue, does not come off as 12. Ordinarily I'd suggest just massaging the number rather than dialogue rework here but there are points when you're hitting, like, late 20s, early 30s in feel. In specific, I'd ease off on sarcasm, use more contractions, and swap out some of that bitterness I'm getting for more active generalized anger. In combination this should reduce the formality of her phrasing and generally dial her back emotionally more towards 'forced into way too much due to recent tragedy, but managing to deal' and away from 'a long, lousy life has been grinding away for decades' - This does not feel like a complete short so much. The events that occurred wrapped up but as it is the story is more or less just relating an incident that occured, sliced out of a larger narrative. I think as a complete chapter it's fine but I don't particularly feel that it stands alone all that well. I think you're almost there but I think you need some sort of general complication in the outline and worked in. A possible third: - The wizard's actual purpose here might be a little too oblique; I'm fairly sure I've worked out his exact intention in being here in the story and i am comfortably in a state of 'is it just paranoia' about the later events... actually, no, it's not too oblique, on second thought. Gracefully done, I should say.

No prob! I certainly have no expectation that everything I say's gonna be helpful, but-- well, you've gathered by now on my end that I like to look at what I get and figure out how to use it to make a thing closer to perfect vision that can only exist in our heads, haha. A wide spray of bullets helps, some of them've gotta land on target.

I think you might be misunderstanding some of what I'm getting at with some of these things: by and large, when I'm saying that you haven't established this or that, I'm not saying you need more content entirely, but that in the wordspace that has been used, it hasn't been put towards selling the weight or stakes or meaning of what's going on-- you're using implied space but the space hasn't been filled with meaning-- for example, this is hinging on a majour religious conflict but we the reader know nothing about the religion. There's by no means a dichotomy between mounds of spoonfeeding information and elegantly establishing a setting, and honestly I think you're letting your initial reaction paint this unnecessarily into that either/or corner. That said, do what you wanna, of course. That said, there's a couple specific things... "(I guess the rest of the folks on here must be those casual readers you refer to.)" Actually, by and large, yes! That's not a knock on anyone-- but you notice how people rarely mention the actual prose or language use in people's submissions? There's comments on the odd word sticking out, or occasionally you'll get 'I liked this sentence', but even then there's rarely much articulation of why something is working for the reader. More often when it didn't-- but it's usually 'this word is out of the story's theme' or 'this sentence was confusing'. There's not really a lot of close examination of how the words come together to make something meaningful, and the very structure of sentences can go a long way to giving an impression to the reader. And if people don't notice that, that's fine-- oftentimes the sentence-level craftsmanship is supposed to be invisible (hence why it catches most often when something's wrong) and there's a lot of valuable insights to be gained by not digging deep into syntax or the semantics but they're absolutely there and can be worked to one's advantage. I don't necessarily expect anyone else to be quite so interested in paragraph aesthetics, however. "(It doesn’t matter. The currency is another detail that doesn’t deserve an explanation.) " You'll notice I didn't say explanation-- just that the currency used here is one that speaks primarily to d&d, which is a problem in a piece too thin on world building, since the hallmark of d&d is genericism. A different word here could cast so many different lights on the implied setting! What a culture names its currency has meaning-- here it has no name at all. This is the sort of thing I'm meaning when I'm talking about missing context-- there's a lot more that can be done with the space that's already there, I think. "(It’s not about her, it’s about the fact that she was the only thing approaching human tenderness in his life, and it really wasn’t at all.)" Well, you don't say that, or even imply that. What you give us in the text is that it's sad that it was a prostitute who was the last decent person to him. Also, this is kind of adjuncting the only significant female character's whole existence within the story into being about the main character's pain. You've got the other named one but she doesn't really do much of anything. "(I'm relying on that doing way more work than it’s up to. It was there to confirm that women soldiers are usual and that there might have been more. Because of the genre stereotypes, I don’t think that readers go in with the expectation that there will be women soldiers.)" Yeah, the issue I'm having here is that the "(a few)" parenthetical undercuts that somewhat-- by having 'men and women', that's suggesting he expects it's normal that they're there; by appending 'a few' you're going back into making it weird and unexpected that they're present. It's Harth's eyes you're using here, and you're not taking advantage of that-- if he's expecting them there, that '(a few)' implies otherwise. Or are there fewer than he expects? If that's so, then it should probably be framed that way? " (Absolutely not. Time is relative. The fact that there are no clocks is irrelevant, a human is conditioned to think in those terms.)" Conditioned to think in those terms, sure-- but this is after you've gone out of your way to have someone call out the main character for using precise timeframes. You give so few details that presenting one and revoking it casually shortly thereafter is odd.

Before you read: the scene to be inserted earlier on with Savae is slated to provide a little more context to what they're doing here, and a bit to the conversation Lasila overhears. To wit: one Varael Ashana, the leader of an organized crime syndicate to whom Savae has some obligation, has required that Savae retrieve some small amount of any bodily fluid belonging to a Senator Riruna, and pass it off to his brother-by-marriage Aserahin (who first appears here). Varael is among other things a student of dark magics, and he does not say but Savae surmises that the fluid is required for a ritual that is outside of their expertise. Now then! Previously: Lasila Vahendra is at this point effectively alone in the world. Her brother Varinen has departed to assist with peace talks that could possibly put an end to the aelin's part in the war with the shudkathra. She is presently attending a celebration honouring the revival of the recently-dead goddess Alia; she hopes to gain connections she can exploit to further her education and ensure that she can find employment that will move her up in the world. She doesn't much like the escort her brother secured for her-- a senator's younger brother. This time: Clothing, clothing everywhere. The dreaded four-way conversation. Politics. Extremely modern fashion. I try to rescue appliques from their sad misuse in fiction. There's a lot of names flying here and a lot going on-- if it's a little confusing, especially before Lasila finds a groove, that's okay, or at least not unintended. She's out of her depth. That said, nobody with a name here is a one-off; general first impressions on Rienri, Iluya, and Senator Melqueth would be appreciated; I'll hold off on asking about Aserahin until he gets lines, next time. Next time: Iluya. Maranthe. Aserahin. Someone new. Kaisa explodes.

Hmmm. I know it's not an ideal solution at all because it does involve cash up front-ish, but isn't it possible to get a lawyer who specializes in these things to look over the contract you've been offered and give some advice? Might do, if you don't have any agents jump immediately with the offer in hand.

Oh, geez, I knew I was forgetting someone, sorry. Let's see here: p.1 I feel like the initial narration is a little bit formal relative to my previous understanding of Oz's voice. It's a different situation, and it's been a number of weeks so this might not actually be an issue, but it did stick up from the get-go. I might opt for less formal/passive words/constructions than 'contains', 'transparent fascination', "for he's", and swap in some contractions where you use full words (doesn't appear remotely rather than does not, eg). But I wouldn't necessarily sweat it here either. I feel like the sentence structure is a little bit too simple here too but this is YA, yeah? I wouldn't be too concerned given that context. 'Aerworks' as a name strikes me as odd, honestly. Not a dealbreaker or a big deal, but it's noticeable. p.2 Seigfried's using 'of course' twice pretty close together in the same sentence; might be worth rephrasing. Are all these companies named <lastname> <industry>? decades-plural long impression? How old is Oz? Over 20 does seem a little old for YA, but I'm not super in touch with that area. p.4 'dropped into the conversation like they're nothing, and I'm unprepared' pretty telly on this and kind of toothless. After a bit of sort of staring at the start of the next paragraph, I guess the bit with the teacup is connected? You're kind of in the passive voice here so it feels unrelated, though. p.5 is phenotype the correct word here? I'm actually asking, lol. 'expanding diaphragm' expanding my etc p.6 'answering laugh' 'answering' is redundant here, given it's literally an answer. 'could not be' 'couldn't' would probably flow better p.7 Y'know, I really don't like that such a significant threat that the Rex are offering here is rape; it's very overdone, it's been well gone-over by people better equipped to articulate the subject why it's not a great idea, it's, ehh, please don't do rapemonsters. p.8 "there's no hiding the incredulity" pretty passively-phrased, pretty disconnected from how ludicrous a proposal this actually is "all of its shares pass to the citizen's council" query: are we the reader supposed to agree that this is a bad thing? (because inherently I wouldn't) I feel like some narratorial thought on the subject, even if it's just an acknowledgement of ignorance, would not be out of line here. "is nodding" again, passive voice, it really creates a weird disconnection between the actual occurences and the narration. "10x" this is the sort of number that is kind of small to be written this way in text; I think 'ten times' would look better? p.10 "is already protesting" passive voice again. p.12 'is mixed' passive p.13 the ending of this is in the family of dialogue that i really don't like, "there's something you should know", "there's no time to explain", "you need to come see this", etc, it's deliberately witholding information and it's placing future tension in the hands of poor communication, in places where it really ought to be clear. Overall I'm finding the tone of the prose a sharp change from the previous chapter (the only one I've read, I'm afraid). I'm not necessarily sure it's to this chapter's credit-- I remember getting a pretty solid feel for Oz's personality in the way he narrated before, but this is very distant in a way that I think isn't helping a lot. Early on before everything's sunk in, it's better--it's sort of catching the surreal feeling he must be getting, but after he leaves the bathroom the prose still feels sort of disconnected to me. You're also falling into certain passive voice traps; I love the present tense but some of these are harder to dodge in this tense. You've got a lot of the "is verbing" rather than "verbs" construction, and I think clearing up that would go a long way alone in making the prose feel much closer up.

And too, as I saw someone point point out on Twitter the other day (I forget who exactly), it's not like real world nb people all use the same thing, so there's no reason fictional ones have to use the same thing. At least in that sense; I think if you did a lot in proximity the text might get bogged down, but then so does a page full of he/she so it's liable more to be about how well it's written than a pronoun derived problem.

Oh, gosh, I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to be a jerk with this, it just didn't really work for me and in large part for for sentence-level structural reasons, which is just impossible to go over in summary without being uselessly vague.

Well, it's the first that Lasila directly calls out as unusual. It drives the society to the point where it's a very intentional decision that neither of the POV characters find much of it unusual. I don't like directly conveying information if there's any other possible option; it's boring. I'd rather get and give this through, among other things, presenting what the POV character considers normative and what they do or do not think about-- forced-air heating is something Lasila doesn't think about more than you or I would, even if it's literal wizards doing it, the chimes they use to speak to each other with at the temple are expected and their function known, they're not using wheels on carriages and rather they float-- it's normative, and it says more about the society that it is than if the narration sidetracked to explain what everything is, a practice which I find to be a blight on the genre. In 5, Savae is an archmage in the fullness of their power-- the magic they work is nearly effortless and without explanation because they don't need to think about how it works or why it works or any of that, not in this scenario. They knock a girl on her butt from ten, fifteen feet away with only a word, and they work silver with their bare fingers. And it's intentional too that the first time we see a POV character using magic, it's like this-- someone who knows exactly what they're doing, who isn't slowing down or stopping. So with the dress-- yeah, it's called out because it's rare enough that Lasila would never have expected it, because it's very expensive--it's high-effort specialist work. So it isn't ordinary at all. And I'm sorry if I picked your line callout to go off about this, it's really not so much about what you said exactly, but I have about a million feelings about the way information is conveyed in fiction and the ways it can be done without the reader noticing that they've had information conveyed to them and sometimes these thoughts sort of spill everywhere, hahaha. This sort of thing too is why I like to frame things in terms of what I intended to convey or my suppositions of what the writer is intending to convey, because that above all else is what is going to be what defines how we approach critique-- the desired end result is, more or less, for the text to convey accurately what the writer wanted (once it is out in the wild of course authorial intent matters less but the disconnect between intention and what is actually conveyed too is an interesting point of analysis) so quite often I am just talking aloud in responses, in the interests of reconciling what I am conveying with what I want it to to... Sorry, I think about this sort of thing a lot lol This too is one of those things that is primarily visible in the cracks, but Lasila probably could stand to pick it up more when she's eyeballing what people are wearing-- but it's mostly low backs. Slits in the back of tops are gauche, a suggestion that the article of clothing wasn't really designed for their particular anatomy. Directly, no; overtly he's being perfectly polite (but addressing her by given name alone at the end is rude, in a he-knows-he-can-get-away-with-it sort of way) but also the context here is that he's a senator's brother and she's pretty stuck in the middle classes; he's asking her things she wouldn't be expected to know, he's telling her things she doesn't know in fairly condescending ways, and the bit about her brother is definitely a blink-and-you'll-miss-it attempted needle into the relationship between them. He's behaving in a way that Lasila could choose to take offense to but that it would speak less of her if she did. And here I'm just summarizing for the below: At least, this is Lasila's surface-level reading, and it's good for what it is. It's not, I think, possible at this point to determine Eshrin's other motivation here is, not yet. He's got reason to believe the situation he's in is unusual, and he's fishing to find out about how she reacts. Mostly when I asked about Eshrin, I wanted to make sure something wasn't being conveyed about him, and since no one's mentioned it, I think I'm good there. Culturally -- by and large Lasila's providing what's normal and expected. You probably know more than you think, but here's where going at the work piecemeal probably doesn't help. But circumlocution is one of the nine great social graces: the direct answer is always going to be the less polite one. I go into it more above, but I think that would convey the opposite of what I'm going for here. It'd be sort of like spotlighting people using a light switch. But we've got more overt magic coming, all right, and some of the everyday stuff being used in unusual ways. Thanks, both of you!

Well... I've got sort of a different take; I haven't read the original submission, so, I don't know what got covered. Sorry if I get kind of snappy, I started pretty late and the sun was up before I finished lol. Overall I'd say that this reads more like an outline than a finished piece; it avoids context like the plague and frequently goes for straight-up telling when the POV character is experiencing an emotion. This sort of prevents the narrative from ever actually conveying feeling of its own, and the result is a text that just says what happens without giving a reason to care. The POV character is frequently contradictory in ways that would almost make me think they're not actually intended to be perceived as a single character but a conglomeration of multiple individuals or archetypes-- if internal conflict is intended instead, it's undercut by telling outright what is being felt, delivering emotion as factoids. Any chance the text does have or come close to conveying emotion in a more fully realized way, it sort of nopes out of it-- I might almost think this was an intentional narrative device but I think that's a bit at odds with how this is presented. And if you're doing something with the afterlife stripping away all emotion, you're going too frequently into 'x felt y' constructions. You're putting cliche in narratively load-bearing locations and you're not providing enough context or backing to be be able to support it. P. 2 Mmm. The style here is very bland, very direct, the sentences very choppy, basically voiceless, and I'm already kind of put off. I don't love starting off with waking up in the first place-- it's kind of cliche as these things go. I get that the story conceit pretty much mandates it, but, ehh, archetypes forced to fight in the afterlife is a cliche too. Right off, you're not conveying a freedom from the battle, there's not a sense of recent newness to this silence. We're just getting told all this. You're doing all your description as simple declaratives, and they're, again, very bland-- it seems like you're going for a detachment in feel right here? But I think you're less accomplishing that than you are making something that's actually somewhat difficult, visually to read. The sentence openers, he, he, he, the, etc. You're not really conveying the calm with the description, because the description is just fact, fact, fact. And this 'deeply, painlessly, relief palpable' bit, that's so very telly-- you're leaning hard on this adverbial phrase here and not really selling it. Going onto p. 3, this first paragraph gets narratively tangled-- you're using multiple hes in the same sentence, it's difficult to follow. 'Harth felt good, strong', please, this is cheaty, this is telly, this doesn't convey anything meaningful. So many sentences consecutively starting with 'he was', 'he was', the verb to be is inherently boring, and that can be used to your advantage but you're not doing it here. Just a little verb variation here would give this some soul. The dialogue-- we've long been over and over again my thoughts about chains of unnarrated, untagged dialogue. It doesn't help give any weight to the dialogue, and you haven't thoroughly established character voice well enough for this to be well-conveyed here. There's nothing to dig into; I need to count lines to tell who is talking. And the couple narrations here are... again, declarative, factive descriptions of action. 'the grey man nodded' period, not comma. I'm not feeling this bit about the creator-- there's no weight to this afterlife, there's no weight to the religion that bears it out-- Harth is presented with the reality of these deep existential things and he's so blase, and even in the face of what can only be an unnatural external calm, I don't buy that there's not so much as a single thought about this. The lack of context here is killing this for me-- his creator, the world's creator, his own faith, I can only presume because there's no question about that, but, ehh. The paragraph going from 3-4... ooh, yeah, you're not selling this at all. 'free of it, dead and free of the slaughter', like he clearly remembers what his life was before, this is all a recent reality for him, but you're not giving any emotional weight to it-- presumably this had been his life but we don't have anything about it, it is devoid of context. And you're definitely not selling 'lightened his heart in moments', because that really never came through at any point previously. 'it was saddening that', why was it saddening exactly? And please, please, 'two copper' as currency is so very d&d. But here, you're relying solely on the fact that this woman takes money for sex as a reason for it to be sad to him, this is lazy and it's telly. If the only way you convey that the character is sad or feeling anything is directly stating 'he felt emotion', it's killing any weight to the sentiment. As they start walking, I'm just gonna stop calling out description done solely as declarative fact-sentences. onto p 5-- 'horde'? What horde? This is an awfully big thing to drop down and it just kinda gets an 'oh ok'. 'Harth felt cheated' again, if this is the only way you have of conveying that he is feeling something, you're being lazy. 'I thought I'd found an end to strife' -- well he sure didn't convey this through his narration! He never even suggested that he cared much either way. The overriding emotion conveyed by the narration is apathy punctuated with straight-up telling emotion, which again, carries no narrative weight; the dialogue can't make up for it. You've got this bit here further down the page with 'feel the buzz of excitement' and 'come to hate these emotions', and man, I don't think emotions work this way so much, I get feeling bad that you like something, I really get that, but when you're full on into the point of feeling sick at this sort of thing it's not exciting anymore. Going onto 6-- this bit about what a faithless man deserved, but this feels weirdly contradictory-- so he doesn't believe in this god at all? That's fine, but it feels very much at odds with when you told us he was feeling cheated by the situation. How could he be cheated out of something he didn't believe in at all? Ooh lower down on the page I'm sort of regretting wanting a bit more life to the description. The way this is conveyed here 'away to the end of time' is reaching for imagery but without providing any imagery; again, it's a cheat and it's the sort of thing that will catch a casual reader and maybe make them go 'ooh' but the moment you actually poke the sentence it falls apart. 'only the sky was wider' this is kind of nonsense, tbh. This whole paragraph feels like it doesn't know what a horizon is. 'perhaps five miles away, given scale...' ooh no this is your engineer talking, this is kind of precise for an eyeballing 'the command he had always wanted' well this is the first time we've heard of it, and if you're trying to sell that he hates war, you're gonna have to do work selling that this is a legitimate ambition for him. What sort of command? How big, how small, etc, etc, etc p.7 'unfamiliar emotion' is a total cheat, okay, I can absolutely believe the character as written doesn't know what feelings are, but really, there's no weight, he can't describe anything at all of what he is feeling? I can't buy that with an actual character; we know basically nothing about him-- we're getting factoids out of nowhere, and we're getting direct 'he felt x', but it's entirely surface level. So maybe he can't fully comprehend the nature of this deep sorrow that's overtaken him, but if you're going that route, we the reader absolutely must be able to know it, and we must feel sorrow for this inability to comprehend in order for it to mean anything. And you're not doing that at all. You really seem to like this 'had he ever x? no' construction, and, ehh, again, it's telly, it's very telly. 'All optimism and aspiration had drained from his life'? But he's always wanted a command. 'Optimism and aspiration' are both probably a bit about this archetype's habitual register, too. More 'Harth experienced an emotion', and I'm gonna stop commenting on these too, as the road broadens; this one I think wouldn't be so bad if it were the exception rather than the norm. He had told himself he would give it up, settle down with a wife... and he'd always wanted a command? He'd always wanted it, but this is the first we've heard of it and we're only knowing of it because he's saying so directly. Honestly, it feels like you're writing less a character than an archetype, and it feels more like two separate archetypes mashed together and we can very easily see the seams. p.8 The citadel's description, ooh, yeah, no, it's back to strings of facts for description. 'presence that had cowed countless recruits' again, this is brand new information, and modestly at odds with the command he had always desired. unwavering belief in his authority, now from the Creator? But by his own admission he has no faith in this creator. p.9 Ehhh so you're describing a bunch of these people initially as individuals, but when you get to the only ones whom you at all specifically call out as being of colour, they're a massed group, without appreciable differentiation between them. And I don't know that you've sold well enough Harth as having any sort of a character to be getting away with such a specific-to-a-certain-personality-type word as 'youngster'. Really don't like that (a few) parenthetical after the women. really? What benefit to the text is going to come from you going out of your way to specifically call out that there's only a few women? There's no other suggestion in the text that it's unusual, so, ehh. p.10 I don't think you've laid the groundwork well enough to give this confrontation between Harth and Magdi real emotional weight. You almost approach it, but you really undercut the bitter 'high-and-mighty' line by just plopping it down there with nothing to carry it. Same with 'the town had fallen', you're just giving it as fact here, the narration is devoid of sensation. 'lines betrayed nothing but stubbornness' very telly, doesn't give us anything really. p.11 if you want me to believe that a career soldier who's lived down in it for long enough he's ground down all hopes and dreams' first choice of word for that any bodily functions are 'perspired' or 'defecated', you've got a lot of heavy narrative lifting to do that just hasn't been done here. Honestly, the tonal mismatch for the POV we're occupying and the character he supposedly is is so huge I'm honestly not sure how to fix it with just spot edits. This doesn't read like a finished piece, it reads like an outline. 'a portentous mark on eternity' an overwrought line like this sticks out really badly against the bland backdrop, and it's a sort of faux-poeticism that I think sort of fails; it doesn't convey any meaning, it doesn't convey any weight, it doesn't give any sense of place. p.12 'just like before', by this point you've told us, but you haven't sold it, you haven't made it feel. 'had expected death to be different' but again, up to this point, we know nothing about what harth has expected or how this differs or how this goes with his nonbelief. 'Fermarald nodded,' period not comma 'surprised at the young man's vehemence' but the narration paints him as being detached, and at this point we have no particular reason to believe that he was doing anything other than simply stating facts-- we have no reason to believe the previous statement was presented vehemently. 'about twenty minutes' but we've already been over that minutes are meaningless and immeasurable here. p.13 said-bookisms. 'fight for the creator' if you want us to believe this is sincere, then this is very much at odds with his nonbelief. the creator thing is honestly really, really lazy, you're placing a cliche of some overgod, I can only assume, overhead and expecting that to take the narrative weight, but without the context of the society that has faith in this god, without knowing anything of the nature of the faith, 'creator' is effectively meaningless here-- we could subsititute, I don't know, 'jim' and it would carry the same narrative weight. 'old tightness' but new to the narrative "Fermarald with me" fermarald comma with p.14 'no fire in the afterlife it seemed' afterlife comma, or just delete 'it seemed' retching then hurrying? all bodily functions are suspended, but not puking? 'feel hollow fear' you're skimming over all of this way too sketchily, I think, to sell that there's any sort of conflict about this. If it's driving him that much-- then I have a hard time buying that he's hating it in the same moment. If the rush is that powerful, he's got no space to hate it until later. p.15 so many declarative facts and nothing but The last paragraph here is nearly effective, but you're undercut again by not doing the work in establishing the religion that's being invoked, and the way the internal conflict all along has fallen flat takes what should be a majour moment of decision and kind of fizzles it. p.16 Honestly, it feels like the last paragraph from the last and this page were what you really wanted to write, and everything leading up to it was just kind of there because there was an obligation to give a reason for it. There's still similar style issues that I'm going to call out here, but overall this feels far less mechanical than all the rest of the piece. 'dark flood blacker still than the gloom' this has some kind of unfortunate connotations, especially with what I noted before about the bit where harth was going over the troops. If it's just the armour that's black that's one thing but as it stands there's no way to tell, and said unfortunate connotations remain. 'dark red like dried blood' similes lack urgency 'seemed taller, harder, they were terrifying' aha! a comma splice! and 'they were terrifying' is again, just lazy. 'fifty yards, the roar...' this sentence works, this sentence does get it across, this is good, it feels, it lives. 'Harth's shield' comma splice after broadsword, semicolon best for the job here. I've got some trouble buying tight formation fighting with effectively random weaponry. There being no blood at the end is a kind of apt metaphor for the rest of the piece, I'm sorry to say.

Ooh! Congrats! And yeah, I'm hoping it's a good offer, eeeeee.

Sure, but 'I'm confused by what you're going for here' is a far, far cry from "singular they, a grammatical construct that has been in use for about a thousand years, makes me cringe so you should use he and include a really hackneyed joke about it to justify it". That's not okay. Critique is not the place to be telling people to shove nonbinary characters back into a binary box. (and the confusion, I think, is not inherently a flaw of the pronoun choice, so much as it is a construct of generally ambiguous writing; assuming for argument that the ambiguity is unintentional, there's no reason any of that can't be nailed down with the singular they, it's just all of the text space is devoted elsewhere; so I do object to centering that objection on that pronoun)