Go to read new chapter. Title is "The Calm Before". Really? Then what were the last two chapters?

Didn't hate it, actually. I mean, the whole "yet another chapter before the action" is still irksome, but conversations between the Woe are always good. There's also a fair amount of wondering if Errata reads this thread (or maybe Ryuugi emails out his rants), because man does some of this dialogue feel targeted. Going back a few chapters, I felt the same thing when Warlock tried to explain away blowing up Shatha's Maze and it pinpoint echoed complaints I had (and still do) about the whole concept. In the end he didn't even have to blow it up. Just say they were updating it and throw in some creativity because it clearly didn't matter other than giving the three of them something to be doing in the background.

Of course, the conversation had to happen anyway. Errata's not oblivious to what he's doing, the Everdark will get an explanation, and Cat drinking heavier and heavier from the fountain of Evil is part of the point. We'll see where it goes, because the whole Classic Evil vs Practical Evil vs Stupid Evil conflict is thematically important to the series so it's clearly going somewhere. On an editing table I'm taking the last two chapters, dicing them up, and merging them. The Mighty of Lotow succumbing gets one chapter, and the intro to Strycht gets a second. This one? This one can stay as is. And that's nice to have.

Also, she finally hooked up with Indrani.

 

I think we also got our answer why Cat hasn't crushed her way through her opposition since becoming the queen of winter.

It’s wasn’t impossible to throw around the kind of workings I’d seen fae royalty employ, it just wasn’t possible without going fucking crazy. For now, anyway. How long before my Peerage grew enough the alienation no longer mattered? But there was a sea of power, somewhere in me

So if I understood that right Cat hasn't really fought with the full mantel of winter since the battle of camps, to avoid the alienation. And this changes things. Mighty Urulan didn't fight the whole Queen of Winter but only a fraction of her power, so the play with arcadia looks different now. Because the mighty she left behind there couldn't fight the queen of winter but only the fraction of power Cat actually used, so how much was that with a peerage of one or two? Could Lords in Arcadia then be a threat to the Mighty there or would it need to be Counts? But now matter how that changes there situation from there is not threat for them in Arcadia, to there are their equals that hunt them day and night in a place they do not know the rules of. Which is a way better reason then Cat send them somewhere were they had to fear nothing powerwise and decided to take oaths in days.

But this leaves on question open, how much of her mantle can Cat use know and will she get stronger with each addition to her peerage? After all Akua looks to Ivah mightier still and she only has a sliver of Cats power. Will that be enough to fight Sve Noc?

Also interesting perspective on what is actually happening here story wise, but I think we are still missing something story and powerwise on how proccer still stands, since Cat thinks the Horned Lords could have stopped the Mighty implying there are more than one active at the same time. So what stops them from crushing Procer?

I mean we now know that neither the dead king or the drow tried to take Procer ever, is there a similar story with the rats? And isn't that a punch in the face for the warden of Good, that desperatly tried to hold the line?

 

The entire Drow arc is worth it for more Archer.

 

*cough*

You might be forgetting the part where Cat--something like six different Mantle power-ups ago--could still kill a Duke and fight a Princess. Cat is not as powerful as she could be, that's true, but she's stronger then she was when she got her mantle, stronger then when she first got her domain, stronger than when Masego unlocked more of her Mantle's power, stronger then when the Winter King freed her and gave her even more, and even stronger than she was when she broke that pivot and became a full Fae--to say nothing of her foisting off Alienation and grasping her powers in this book. Urulam, the weakest Sigil Holder in the weakest City, fought that and nearly murdered her repeatedly.

No, Lords would not be threats. No, Counts would not be threats. Cat was butchering Lords and Counts half a dozen powerups ago. Fucking Dukes wouldn't be enough, frankly; we saw what the Dukes did and Urulam beat the pants off of it. Unless a Prince or Queen is hunting them, any Fae they meet would die.

Cat having room to grow stronger doesn't make the endless hordes of Fae nobodies matter. Let's not go crazy here.

Procer, meanwhile, hasn't made any sense in a long, long time. We already knew there were multiple Horned Lords, because Ranger said so; people were trying to figure out how the hell Procer was still around after 2000 years of the Dead King and even more than that of the ratlings and the possibility that maybe there weren't was floated, but there's never been anything to remotely support that. Again, Klaus had to fight the Longtooth Lord a couple of decades ago.

How the Calernia exists the way it does with anything learned in Book 4, who the fuck knows.

 

Ryuugi is actually the wandering bard. Calling it now.

 

We're definitely similar; I mean, we both want to murder most of the cast, want to just fucking get rid of Procer already, and would happily burn down most of Calernia in return for a good story. I'm not saying she's my spirit animal, but, well.

Still, someone has to remember what the hell happened in this story, because the story itself very clearly does not. The story keeps wanting to portray the Fae as these vast horrors from another dimension, which would be really cool, but it already established that they're punk ass bitches that can be defeated with cliche lines and on accident. You can have the Fae Cat slaughtered most of a court of or you can have Fae that have a snowballs chance in hell against people who's make the Cat that beat the Fae their bitch, but you can't really have both. Urulam would have murdered n+1 Fae.

 

I'm definitely not crazy about the 'dropping drow in Arcadia' plan either, Ryuugi, but to play advocate again for a brief moment - it's not just the fae who are dangerous in Arcadia, but Arcadia itself.

It's been repeatedly upheld that stories are the laws of gravity in Arcadia way more so than in creation - capturing the Princess was done there, Wandering Bard did the mysterious cloaked stranger bit, and so on and so forth. I agree that a lot has been thrown out the window, but not that bit yet.

The drow are nutty powerful, true. But they're also savages who know fuck all about stories with very few exceptions (like, presumably, Sve Noc). I definitely am on the team of 'when the fuck did portals become atom slicers' same as you, but I can see the drow, even Mighty, getting rope-a-doped by the fae when the fae are on their home turf - especially when they get dropped in there presumably on a narrative back-foot.

 

Here's the issue with that--that's just not how that works. Now, let me pause here and say I wish that was how this worked. I think it would have been more interesting if that was how this worked. But sadly, and possibly to the detriment of the story, it's not. The narrative is the only true law in Arcadia, this much is true, but the Fae are not the savvy rulers of that narrative, they are it's helpless puppets. This is actually called out a number of times--once by the Dead King, once by Sulia, and several others I don't remember as clearly.

Now, personally, I wish that wasn't the case. Given the choice, I think I'd rather they be bound by the story, but skilled manipulators of it; bound tightly to the rules, but expert rules lawyers. One of my constant complaints about the story is that everyone apparently knows the narrative is a thing, but Black and Cat run around beating the pants off of everyone at it, even more experienced people, for no apparent reason but what seems like the story's favor. I'd have liked it if the Fae came in and changed all that, and we got to see people who were themselves masters of storytelling.

But that's just not what we got. Like, you say that the drow are savages that know fuck all about stories and to a point, maybe that's true*. It kind of doesn't matter. Cat didn't know jack shit about how the Fae work when she told the Winter Rider 'you won't get away with this!', but that locked him instantly into defeat. Light prompting forced him to monologue all his plans to her. A baseless and cobbled together story nerfed the Duke of Violent Squalls hard and one that was made up on the spot with no build up, support, or backing crushed the Princess of High Noon. Anytime and every time we saw Fae stories clash with mortal stories, it was not a clever wrangling of the narrative--it was a one-sided domination of the latter over the former. This is not an exaggeration, it's something that literally comes up in the text; after Akua decides, literally just in her head, that the ability to control devils > the ability to control things from outside Creation > the ability to control Fae, she uses that to completely and instantly dominate one of the Princes of Summer, using him to maim another and then kill himself. The remaining Prince was, as you might expect, horrified and uncomprehending. To quote:

And we've seen this happen in Arcadia, too. And we've seen it happen to the strongest Fae, as it happens. We've seen Sulia dominated utterly with a half-assed story, and once the Summer Queen was caught in Cat's story, she literally could not disobey it. She didn't want to marry the King. She was horrified by the mere idea and would rather have destroyed them all and started the cycle again. But she was left staring in horror as her mouth literally spoke the words against her will.

That's the important thing to remember here. The Fae are not Arcadia's masters. The Fae are not the story's masters. They are it's slaves.

So the fear that a more savvy Fae might take the advantage is somewhat hard to swallow, because we've seen what it takes to take the advantage from the Fae and it can literally boil down to bitter words. You don't have to do it intentionally; accidental words still fuck up the Fae.

And that's not even getting into the fact that each of these Fae are pound for pound tougher than Cat was when she was a Duchess. And not by a little bit, either.

TL;DR: The story is trying to portray the Fae as these eldritch horrors now that Cat, you know, is one. The thing is, we got a Fae arc, and in it, mortals were eldritch horrors to the Fae.

*Though actually, the Night seems to have preserved a lot of that in various ways and it's important to remember the Grey Pilgrims lesson on other cultures. In Guide, stories are just reoccurring patterns, and let's be real here--all of Drow society is one big, fat reoccurring pattern. They have stories, they just call it a life-style.

 

Chapter got off to an interesting, honestly even exciting start, with what seemed like a Named dream talk between Black and Cat, and I was ready to be on that shit, but it turns out I got jebaited. Black turns out to be Sve Noc and you'd figure our first 'face to face' conversation between Sve and the invader/enslaver of her people would be cool and exciting, but it's kind of not. You'd figure that with the last chapter being called The Calm Before, this chapter would naturally be the Storm, but it's actually more build up, which is sad.

Worst of all, it means that Cat's probably not going to pay any attention to what 'Black' said, which is the greatest loss of all, because maybe he could have talked some sense into this goddamn arc.

The rest of the chapter is the morning after between Cat and Indrani, which was nice and all, but the story had me ready to go and then left me with a disappointing conclusion. Mostly, it's more talk about how Sve Noc's mind is maybe split and how that could be used against her, but I'm still fucking pissed off that we aren't addressing the immediate concern of 200 Ranger-lite drow with any degree of seriousness. Goddamn it Cat, you yourself have noticed how terrifying the drow are and you're still ignoring this!?

 

I was proper excited when the chapter opened with Black telling Catherine about his mistakes - I thought we were going to get one last lesson before the culmination of what was going on in Procer. Blacks been paying his dues all his life and his payback from Under was one last goodbye

What we got wasn’t bad, persay. But it wasn’t what the opening lines of the chapter led us to believe and so instead of payoff we just got disappointment

 

So what bothered me about the last chapter wasn’t the “get on with it” nature, or how a Black’s Last Lesson chapter is now something I really do want, but the timing of the Sve reveal. Archer gave Cat the two faced figure last chapter, setting up the question. Then next chapter we’re handed the answer, and Cat goes on a tangent about how she’s gonna use it against the Sve. C’mon Errata, you’re better than that. Gotta pace that out. More breadcrumbs.

While there’s some cohesion problems, there’s some damn good world building in the Guide. The ancient drow empire is magnificent, and while I certainly want to see it in all its glory, I also want the story of its downfall. Don’t fuck it up.

That said, still a nice read. Archer/Cat dynamic is as fun as always, and some good byplay with the fairy tale.

 

Is it just me or did Cat just completely overlook the issue with causing in-fighting among the drow? Namely that if two drow fight and one comes out on top, the end result is just an even bigger problem? Like, with pretty much any other group, causing a fight to break out and result in people killing each other is a perfectly good strategy, but as Cat notes here, the number of drow is not the issue when fighting them. If you get a drow army of fifteen thousand to murder it's way down to one guy, that's not a good thing.

Cat, that ship has sailed and we all know it. In point of fact, you have discussed how you spend your nights with Akua. Hell, for that matter:

Bitch, she's been the brains of your entire team since you got to the Everdark.

Anyway, this was another chapter where we didn't really do much but set the stage for the coming battle, like the last five or so. In a broad sense, I don't have a problem with that, because setup is just fine if it leads to a pay off, but this book has been burning me hard on the pay-off side of things in general, and the Everdark arc in particular. Like, we've skipped over actually conquering Lotow, the Peerage that's been used to multiply Cat's power all surrendered to her after a week of mild discomfort that they could explicitly survive just fine in, and we've skipped over everything since. We've gotten a conga-line of shocking implications since we got her that Cat's just up and ignored, so am I supposed to expect this to be an interesting confrontation? That I'm going to get actual, logical conflict and consequences from this arc, that Cat might lose? Because if so, I don't.

Cat's marching into a battle with a group that's theoretically a match for her army, with a force that hopelessly dwarfs it into nothingness on the way, with a story of horrendous evil, treachery, and invasion behind her, but we all know shit like that doesn't matter; she just rolls over anything in her way until they outright sell themselves into slavery, because reasons. We got a chapter of Sve Noc being set up as two-faced, followed by an immediate explanation of why, and vague story implications, and with Cat, that's sure to be an utter victory, even if it's nonsense the entire way.

The numbers and reasons and explanations of the drow arc just flat-out don't matter to the story, so I'm just flat-out tired of looking at them when it's not even going to respect me enough to dress them up. Yeah, as a general rule in stories, the main character is bound for victory somehow or anything, but half the victories she's gotten in this book have boiled down to people going 'Well, it's been a few hours of fighting; what am I gonna do, try? Nah, I give up.'

 

What the fuck.

I stopped reading back at the end of Book 2, because I wanted to build a nice backlog to get back to.

I've now caught up, and my reaction, once again, is:

What the fuck?

Why do we have all these fireside conversations that promise all these giant changes but are like a fucking +2 approval scene from a video game?

Drow, why?

Why, holy shit why, has this book dragged on for the better part of a year with the majority of it being literally "Drow lol"?

What happened to the Practical Guide to Evil part? Right now it just feels like Evil... which I could buy off on if it was to make a plot point but so far for like a million words it's just been, lol I guess Catherine Foundling is just gonna be evil now, fuck it lol. Maybe this will pay off when the Discount!Lolth is like actually an Angel or some shit and was really evil but good and so this was all justified. 'Justified'.

Oh my god, how many climaxes are we gonna get that don't actually matter at all? This is just like, constant 'escalation' and 'stakes', over and over again, with no real reason or rhyme. It's like Magic Worm or some shit and oh my god can we not.

Seriously the Interludes have been the best parts of Book IV by a mile because they are interesting, move the plot along, and actually show me characters who are growing or pointedly resisting growing. Instead of, welp, time to have another 'ol fireside chat with [INSERT FOLLOWER HERE] and then totally ignore what I resolved to do like I have the memory of a goldfish.

Fuck.

 

Honestly not much to say here, though that might be my growing apathy with this arc talking. The plan itself is fine, allowing for the enemy drow continuing to be a bunch of idiots with no goals/abilities that could fuck up Cat's elaborate plans--but hey, that's been true this whole arc, so why let that stop her now? Similarly, Cat notes a whole bunch of things that make taking and enslaving the drow a horrible idea--but hey, that's been true this whole arc, so why let that stop her now? Random drow continue to sell themselves into slavery for, uh, reasons and the drow continue to get crushed before the might of the conquistadors and blah blah blah.

It's one of those chapters that doesn't really upset me or even frustrate me, but continues to leave me feeling tired. This entire arc just feels like a hole the story has dug itself into, and in trying to escape that hole--to give meaning to this arc and make it interesting--it's instead made missteps that have only deepened it, until all I really care about now is getting out of the hole, but instead we just keep digging deeper. I'm certain this city will fall and Cat will utterly defeat the Longstriders no matter how dumb that is, but even though the story has raised the stakes so high that Cat stands to walk away from this with the greatest army that has ever walked the surface of Calernia, I just don't care anymore.

 

I think the reason for much of the readers' boredom is that we know Cat is going to survive and do well enough to challenge the Dead King and Malicia, because that's where the story has been headed for some time. This "side quest", for lack of a better term, fails to capture our attention because the stakes are really quite low.

 

Holy shit I could not care less about the scheming at this point. I'm just paging through it because it's so boring. This entire arc is the worst

 

So I watch RWBY for some reason, and man did it leave a bad taste in my mouth. The Pats weren't playing yesterday, so I couldn't rely on them to be a palette cleanser, so hey, maybe now that we're on to some action my favorite currently updating web series can do it. Eh. Should've remembered that the first chapter of battles tend to be a bit boring.

I grieve, not for the problems of power creep, but because Robber is now officially outclassed and has lost all purpose.

 

I grieve because that chapter was entirely unnecessary.

 

But, like, the previous chapters had you holding open gates against people for hours at a time...? Hell, you use over a dozen in this chapter alone...you know what? Never mind; I don't care.

Anyway, there continues to be not much to say. The action in this chapter isn't bad, in fact parts of it are honestly well written, it's just pointless. Cat draws deeper upon her Mantle and taps into the grand uses of power more characteristic of Akua* to crush a Mighty that might otherwise be a match for her, and that's cool, I guess--it's just, there's nothing else to it. I have no idea who that guy was, for example; we never get a name, not for him or for anyone else in this chapter, or even really a description, and then he died. Everyone who's appeared so far has received a social status at most and are identified by if they have a cool trick or not. Cat defeating him is...good, I guess? In the sense that it advances Cat's plans, I mean. But that's all it is, because it's not like this guy was built up to matter in any capacity except as a drow with a cool trick and/or a potential slave; we have never seen him before, we don't know about him, his death advances no cause but this battle's.

Right now, she wants to have the Rumena Sigil and these other guys serve as cannon fodder for the Longstriders when they get here, because they're supposed to hinder two hundred Ranger-lite drow or something, I guess? To that end, she needs to sow chaos and such not. She succeeds. Okay.

I still have no investment in any of the people here, though, the drow are still selling themselves into slavery at the drop of a hat, and this one-sided battle continues to be one-sided. One of the many problems with this arc is that we're just Pokemon, with less of a story and less fleshed out monsters; we're going to places we don't know or care about to fight people we don't know and have no stake in so we can take them with us to other places we don't know or care about to fight people we don't know and have no stake in. Today, Cat won a victory against the Rumena Sigil, who you might recognize as those guys from that thing, or maybe not, because we've never met them before now and none of them have names or faces. This victory has enabled Cat to do stuff and things, so she can continue to fight people in places.

Tune in next time for our next exciting installment; same drow time, same drow channel.

Meanwhile, Cat casually says 'People it had taken me months to bind and empower, dead in the snap of a finger', so she's been here for at least two months, given that plural, plus a month for the Dead King and such. Should we just write off Procer at this point? Because the Dead King started invading two or more months ago, so...is the Crusade over, or...?

Oh, also, Callow is a place that exists, I guess? Dunno if it matters much to the story, though--the Everdark is clearly where all the important shit happens.

*Didn't we have a chapter where she talked to Akua about how she wasn't going to do this? Like, this isn't even to say I think tapping into greater uses is bad, it's just she totally said she wasn't going to do this. But fuck it, I already know Cat gets amnesia immediately after any one-on-one talk with her friends; I really should just stop expecting them to matter.

 

Now there we go. I had fun with this one. Cat deciding that because she was in the air she could ignore her body for a bit was pretty dumb, and she's certainly outgrown the "three gates a day" rule (I mean maybe she broke it before but whatever). The whole point of this chapter is Cat not fighting like a bloody idiot anymore, and safe to say it accomplishes that. Plus a dash of reaching towards the "ancient demigod" power level she's supposed to have.

Speaking of power levels, that's kindof an issue here, although the example I'm gonna bring up is the opposite of what we've dealt with so far. From what's all been thrown around so far, I expected the trio Cat fought at the end to be similar to Urulan and his two lieutenants. The ones who nearly killed her on account of Cat forgetting that she has powers besides misting available to her. Archer takes out one. Ivah another. And Cat annihilates the third. Was this supposed to be a parallel to that fight where Cat does way better with the power of friendship and believing in herself? Sure, classic storytelling technique, but it's kinda weird here. She trounces them too easily. The encounter is a footnote. Sure, Ivah absorbed Urulan and "killable by Archer" is an appropriate power level, but that's just it. Easily killable by Archer is not how I would describe Urulan and friends, even if she has to bring out a fancy trick for it. It feels like a regression. On one hand, good. The Mighty needed one of those. But it just makes the Urulan fight feel so much more out of place. Also, story has to not forget about this and go back to the Mighty being able to kill 90% of the Named we've ever met without breaking a sweat.

Of course, same chapter and those three killed a couple hundred drow in seconds, which is some Warlock level shit. So maybe it's just scaling up Archer and Ivah instead of taking the drow down a peg. Meh. Regardless, unless all the Night powers disappear with the death of the Sve (which would make sense, given that it's allegedly her domain manifested), Cat won't even need to bring Callow's army out to whoever she fights. Remember when we walked into this arc and thought the drow would be dumb and useless fighters?

All of them, Cat. All of them.