Originally Posted by
Aedilred
There were times when I found it, if not "boring" per se, at least to be dragging a bit. It seemed like there were a few occasions where the characters just stood or sat around and blathered about the rights and wrongs of what they or other people were doing for longer than necessary. This even extended to sequences like fighting the Ettin, which I felt went on a bit long.
(...)
With its being a prequel, obviously at no point did I feel Hinjo or O-Chul were in peril. I didn't really care that much about either of the other principal human characters (and the "fakeout death" for Mrs. Kapoor did nothing for me, and the same goes for the later "graveyard fakeout" with Zhou). I was taken aback by Pangtok's death, but the earlier bit with Mrs. Kapoor had lulled me into thinking that most of the characters were going to emerge unscathed.
I did wonder how they were going to resolve the situation, but the characters themselves weren't in any direct peril - they were only going to get hurt if they chose to involve themselves - so the problem lacked real immediacy for me. And the situation also seemed contrived to be unnecessarily hard to resolve, with the Sapphire Guard commander as an even less reasonable version of Miko, completely impervious to any kind of sense, and also with a superweapon at his disposal. I did not anticipate O-Chul's method of solving the problem (I had expected him to do a Rocky and wear down Gin-Jun over the course of the duel). Moreover, the whole duel thing itself came out of nowhere, since it hadn't been mentioned until that point (that I noticed) and moreover the technicality of Hinjo's invoking it rather than O-Chul's didn't make a lot of sense given Hinjo told us only a couple of pages before that he was of a different clan to O-Chul and Gin-Jun and therefore would presumably not have any tradition of gyeoltu anyway. I won't go so far as to call it a deus ex machina since it did not in itself resolve the plot but it seemed like the plot backed itself into a corner and had to handwave its way out a bit.
I also have to admit that I didn't find the story particularly funny. There were certainly moments that made me smile, but for most of its length it seemed rather wrapped up in its own importance, and some of the attempts at levity were weak, imo. It's unusual for OotS not to be entertaining in that sense even when it is dealing with weightier issues. The OotS can be a bit preachy at times, but it doesn't tend to get bogged down in it too badly or for too long, whereas I think this story did.
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