fyreant's review-of-the-review!

(I thought about trying to do an in-character dialogue but I don't think I have any characters that would work well for it)

I was giggling like an idiot through this whole one. Marcie and Gina were in rare form, here. It was almost everything I was hoping for and more.

First of all: The edit of the chapter title was... I don't know what I was thinking there, honestly. It wasn't intended to indicate the last chapter update, but that some updates and polishing had been done to the first few chapters. Assuming people would care about re-reading the intro chapter after all this time was probably wishful thinking.

Secondly - the first 'real' criticism is completely on point. Authors, you MUST find a way to avoid exposition dumps early on, especially in the first chapter, and ESPECIALLY in the first few paragraphs!!! If you absolutely must do an infodump work it into a dialogue. But honestly, there's no way to do an exposition dump well, only "less badly". Trying not to ever do them at all is probably unrealistic, just like telling someone to never eat donuts or smoke crystal meth is unrealistic, but always recognize that they're bad and should be avoided.

And then, much to my delight/deep psychological horror, Gina and Marcie honed in on the giant, glaring plot hole near the beginning - the question of why Zoe cares so much about Irene's request or feels the need to placate her, since Zoe is a reigning countess and Fiona is just a noble maiden. It is such a bad plot hole that I tried to fix it later on in chapters that Gina and Marcie didn't get to and ended up making it much, much, MUCH worse in the process. It is such a bad plot hole that, spoiler alert, it gets a supernatural retcon slapped over it.

Give me more of your scorn, Gina! I deserve it! I've been a bad little girl!

Now, the one and only place where I feel the need to defend myself: Zoe and her followers battlefield defeat that leads to all the "dubcon" or "****" or, "oh hell, just call it **** and be honest about it you self-justifying degenerate": This is one of those 'reality is unrealistic' things. History is so chock full of incidences where a smaller, better trained **** with better morale and battle experience defeats a huge mob that greatly outnumbers them that it isn't some kind of heroic reversal of fortunes like fantasy writers make it out to be, it's just the expected friggin' outcome.

And in any case, Zoe kneecaps her own chances with her half-assed attempts at military strategy. It isn't explicitly pointed out but this is meant to show that Zoe is not good at strategy - normally in fiction, when a character is shown to be a bad commander in charge of a battle, it's by having them order a blind overconfident attack, but in reality, that is often less of a blunder than hesitating or making a timid, half-assed attack out of fear. Also I was trying to subvert expectations that magic is a trump card on a medieval fantasy battlefield, especially if the magicians in question don't have any actual battle experience. This crops up again later on where, in a subversion of dark fantasy tropes that usually depict necromancy and mobs of zombies as being a terrifying unstoppable ****, in this setting, zombies are useless in combat. Yes, they're scary and gross and will make untrained fighters flee, but they're too slow and stupid to pose a threat to anyone willing to actually fight them.

Oh, I got off on a tangent. Back to the "diet ****". The "I-can't-believe-it's-not-****". This is another area where both Marcie and Gina put their fingers on a big flaw, and rightly so. The back-and-forth swing of Marzena's character when Ross is threatening to **** her is very tone-breaking - and the reason is because I originally intended for it to be a sudden "shit got real" moment, but then I decided that if the "shit" got too "real", then I wouldn't be able to go back to the lighthearted tone that I enjoy writing in. So, I turned it into a sort of head fake where for a moment you're led to believe that the narrative is going to start treating nonconsenusal sex with the seriousness it rightly should be, only to swerve and say "NOPE! Sike!" It doesn't work that well, honestly, but it is what it is.

About the **** scenes - the elephant in the room is that this is a common fantasy and fetish. There is a good reason not to discuss it too openly in polite society or let it get too mainstream: because some people can't distinguish fantasy from reality and take it too far. But there is also, in my opinion, a good reason to use it in places like this site where it's allowed: because "it make pp hard + vajayjay wet". However, although it's arousing to imagine being helpless in the grip of dastardly, sweaty brutes (and I do realize I'm not speaking for Gina, here), it spoils things, for me and many others, if it is done in a way that is violent, painful and traumatizing. Hence contrived situations where the 'victims' make the first move and have things like the drawing straws. This is why nothing actually happens to Marzena, and by the time she does have sex with her captors she's gotten her sense of agency back by seducing their leader. It almost flips the script and serves as a humiliation for the man - a mighty warrior and leader of a small army who halts the entire march because he just can't wait to bone a literal witch who started making eyes at him.

Which is why I have the characters react "cutely" to it. Incidentally, Rima is a stealth expy of a character from a multiplayer FPS ('Evie') in terms of appearance and personality. Which... probably makes the whole thing worse and even more gross. Oh well!

Anyway - I love that by picking the wrong branch, Gina managed to avoid - by the span of only a single chapter - the first (brief) lesbian action in the story, between Zoe and Tula. My only regret is that the review didn't continue long enough for Gina to be tormented by the fact that the only other girl-girl scenes, of which there are two, both take place as part of foursomes with dicks involved.

As a final thought addressing the delightful description of Zoe as 'the kind of evil I can get behind': the unspoken subtext is that it's easier, I think, for the author and reader to sympathize with Zoe despite the fact that she is a cowardly, evil schemer because... she's a girl in a rather male-dominated setting. How is this 110 pound blonde waif supposed to be a fighter in an era when fighting means swinging around a heavy slab of iron for hours on end? Nevermind a man; even a taller, heavier woman will easily beat her into the ground. That's why she is a cathartic self-insert fantasy: her disadvantages as an underdog give her license to be a prissy, scheming, shameless little tramp who uses her body to get her way and casually offers up other women sexually to benefit herself.

The reason I found this branch so fun to write is because it's intended as an intentional subversion of 'feminist fantasy' tropes, and I was so, so delighted to see Marcie picking up on that. The main character is doing the 'girlboss' thing that is in vogue because it's such a fun power fantasy. But she does it with evil, regressive methods that make a mockery of the basic feminist fantasy formula. Instead of defying social norms and becoming a great warrior to show 'women can fight, too!', she uses her unearned aristocratic privilege and her sexuality to manipulate men into fighting her battles for her. Even the actual examples of warrior women who appear later on are somewhat subversive. Baroness Tula is an actual fighter, unlike Zoe, but her 'lady knight' role is still more-or-less dependent on her sex appeal, and she only wins fights against male opponents because she has better gear. The Amazons who appear later actually are extremely good at fighting and can beat men in a fair fight, but their sense of honor and distaste for what Zoe represents ends up with their defeat and sexual subserviance to the same soldiers they outshone on the battlefield.

Instead of liberating other women from sexual servitude, Zoe profits from it. Rather than pushing past opposition from stuffy old men, the patriarchs of the setting are pretty receptive to her promise that her rise to power (along with her city/system, which is explicitly a much more "modern" commercialized society than the feudal culture around them) means more opportunities for sexual gratification for them, and women from the traditional society hate her more than anyone.

...uh oh, I just spent a dozen paragraphs getting high off my own farts. I better delete all this instead of just thoughtlessly pressing the publish chapter button like I usually do when I write something really shi