In Review: A Fool's Goddess - Chapter Twenty-Five

Hey there. Hard to believe we’re at Chapter Twenty-five already—and that it took us so long to get here.

When I started this project, I didn’t think too hard on the fact that it would take over a year to post and review every chapter of my first novel. Granted, I also didn’t realize that going over the areas I could improve on would run out barely midway through—hence why they’re now laden with my personal thoughts. Still, this shit has been great for helping me understand and overcome some flaws in my writing, and I can even look back at the reviews I’ve posted here and think of ways to improve them.

Helluva year indeed. Let’s hope the last five reviews are worth something too.

Chapter Twenty-Five begins the final arc of the story. Asa is back for unknown reasons and Lior is filled with bloodlust. Unfortunately, our silly sculptor loses sight of his nemesis almost immediately and is instead forced to alert Tzofiya, leading to their lengthy discussion.

And, boy howdy, is it an unnecessary discussion.

While the prior chapter was fluff for character development that I added late in the process, Twenty-Five is the opposite. It was included early on and dresses itself as necessary storytelling, but beyond giving Tzofiya the spotlight again, everything in here could have been either bypassed or summarized in a paragraph or two.

My big beef here is that everything mostly resets to zero by the end of the chapter. “Lior is pissed” goes into “Tzofiya calms Lior down” and ends on “Lior is pissed”. I can see that my earlier self wanted the feeling to be that Tzofiya talked Lior down from going straight for a homicide, but there’s really no need to have a whole fucking chapter-long chat to show that. A short aside of Lior reflecting on how him committing murder might affect Tresety, Tzofiya, or his apprentices would probably have worked just as well—to say nothing of contemplating how his goddess might see such an action.

Though I do get my past self’s argument here: Lior is filled with a hunger for revenge over Master Malka and Chen so seeking violence is reasonable. I think part of my present issue is that I don’t feel like Lior would have gone off the kill Asa on his own at this point. Considering he’s pals with the mayor, it stands to reason that he would have gotten her help immediately instead of turning to her after he lost track of Asa. In addition, he learned the hard way that he’s not a fighter. Lior clearly doesn’t care about honor or pride in this context; wouldn’t he rather just form a mob and gang up on his friends’ murderer?

I suppose those illogical actions can come off as human errors, but this whole chapter just doesn’t sit right with me anymore. I think I just wanted to get Tzofiya ‘on-screen’ again and chuzzed up the story’s rhythm because of it. Something quicker and more concise would have worked better, but instead we got this schlock.

I am truly sorry about that.

I think it also bugs me that the conversation they have isn’t particularly interesting either. Tzofiya has a few good lines, but it also needlessly restates Lior’s shortsightedness. We just had a bit about that in the prior chapter so it really didn’t need to be said again. Other than that, it’s just some bloated back-and-forth of ‘don’t kill Asa because it will make a huge fucking mess’, stuff could have been way more brief.

At least the chapter ends with a decent cliffhanger. Again, it’s basically a reset that proves Twenty-Five was pretty unnecessary, but at least the chapter isn’t pure garbage. It’d get 1 star on a good day, but every turd has a silver lining, right?

So it goes. Anyways, moving on…

…

Huh.

I actually don’t have anything else to really talk about.

This chapter didn’t really bring any other discussions to mind. Lust for revenge is a pretty basic topic, and the chapter does do a decent job portraying the struggle between giving in to your hatred over considering the impact such actions will have on those you love (even if that debate is just fluff). Likewise, I don’t have any anecdotal bits worth mentioning. Life in COVID-Land is the same as ever, so unless anyone wants another dozen paragraphs of me bitching about fighting games and their shitty netcode, I think I’m done here.

Weird considering I opened with pointing out the personal shit I normally include in these. Maybe doing this for a year is even exhausting that part of myself, or maybe being cooped up in my house for the past five months is making it hard for me to think of interesting things to write about. Who knows. Either way, I’ll hopefully have more to say next time, but I won’t drag this out any longer than I am.

Be good to yourself and others, and I’ll catch you elsewhere.

I wish you all the best of luck.