The Book Thread

[Eldan]

After ruling all that out, I am rather curious about what it is you're enjoying. Is it just the style? I suppose it might be the plot, but I would think okay-ish characters and lacking worldbuilding would affect that.

The plot is currently weird and interesting enough that I'm still engaged, yes. I want to see where it's going and if it's actually going to make any sense at the end. Because currently, there's a lot of open questions.

And I don't hate the characters, I'd just wish they'd all talk to each other, dammit. And it's weird how jokey they still are while being slaughtered.

Edit: comments on worldbuilding:

Tolkien works for me. The logicists are never explained in that much detail. Like, what is Gondor's currency? How many farmers are there in Rohan? How big exactly is the population of all those cities in southern Gondor that send troops for the final battle? What is Sauron's chain of command between himself and his troops? These are not questions that are answered, but they don't need to be answered. We still get a feeling of who the characters are, where they come from and why they are fighting, why they are going on a quest together and even why Boromir betrays the others.

In Gideon... you quickly get a feeling which one is the "soldier planet" or the "science planet" or the "artsy planet" among the Nine, though not for all of them. Even now, I have no idea what the Fourth does. And I only have the vaguest idea what they are competing for or why it is a competition. When the teacher tells them what their goal is in the beginning? There is seemingly no reason for them to be secretive about it. And that doesn't really change. There's eight challenges, leading to eight magical theorems and if you solve all eight, you can become a lictor. But they are explicitely told that all eight of the challengers can do it, lictorhood is not a limited resource. But they all just run off alone and... do things. This would work if we were told these are feuding noble houses, say, like in Dune. But there's no actual implication in the text. They all serve the emperor, they have different specialties, they are all seemingly fighting in the same war, and there doesn't seem to exist any kind of massive resource scarcity, or even something like imperial favour to compete for, as the Emperor is conspiciously absent and distant from everything.

So what I really want from the book is a good reason for why people are a) hostile to each other b) not even considering solving some of the tasks as a group or sharing solutions* c) being killed.

*Yes, there's a limited number of keys, but not everyone needs every key. You can just share keys. Or unlock a door and leave it open.