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

Hey there, and welcome back to another one of my reviews. I’m feeling good tonight and have a lot to talk about, so expect a fat article today. Per usual, I’ll start off with the non-story-related stuff, so let’s dive on in.

Let’s talk about death.

It might sound odd considering I just said I’m feeling good, but my cat died last Wednesday. I’d describe my feelings on the matter as sad but not upset. She lived a long, full life of 20 years and was put down peacefully. She was hit by a car, breaking her leg, though she didn’t actually seem to be in that much pain. And since that was the second time she had been hit (the first happened when she was two years old), I have no regrets concerning her life or her death.

Maybe that sounds very adult-ish—or maybe cold—but rest assured, I was crying my eyes out that day. I’d had that cat for almost as far back as my memory goes, and it always hurts to lose a friend. But I suppose seeing her go without great suffering did a lot to ease my pain.

However, that was the first time I was present for the death of a pet, and it has left me with some unwieldy thoughts I’d like to share.

I suppose the first one I’d like to tackle is how insulting death feels. I held my cat as she was euthanized, and I was startled by how little had changed physically. She was still warm, still soft, still weighed the same, yet she was irrevocably different. I watched as she stopped breathing, listened to the vet announce her death, but she still felt like a cat, not a corpse.

I must have been expecting something more pronounced, but the fact that so little changes in a body through its passing feels like a cruel joke. The heart stops, everything goes limp, and you become little more than food and memory. Frankly, it pisses me off that if I hadn’t been there, you could have handed me her body and I would have thought she was just sleeping.

Isn’t life supposed to be the most significant aspect of our existences? Shouldn’t its departure be more noticeable? I suppose a more violent death is instantly recognizable, but why would God allow one’s passing to be so subtle?

Why do we have to bear the onus of determining that one of our own has died?

Well, as they say, she’s in a better place now. Rest in peace, Squishy. We never expected your name to be so fucking ironic, but how many cats can say they got by a car twice—with 18 years between the incidents? …Shit, I’m gonna miss you, you old bitch.

This whole thing also redoubles my thankfulness that my dog is okay. I feel like an asshole for knowing this, but the idea of losing my dog to cancer after she had just turned eight terrified me. In contrast, my tears have already dried for Squishy, and part of me hates myself for that.

But I guess that’s telling of how the length of a life has a strong effect on the impact of its death. An elderly man passing rarely feels worse than the loss of a child. Cruel in some sense, but I think it’s proof of how valuable life is. Seeing someone depart after getting their fill of Earth’s wonders can be satisfying—just as seeing them die before their prime leaves us anguished and frustrated.

God, now I have no idea how people can even kill one another. I had written those sections about Malka and Chen’s deaths based on my memories of losing my grandmother, but I wasn’t there when she finally passed. Feeling the life leave a creature…I just don’t understand how anyone put up with having blood on their hands.

Whatever. What I’m getting at here is that I didn’t quite understand the true nature of death until I had personally witnessed it happen to something I had in my daily life. I could only really feel my grandma’s passing at family gatherings, but going to places in my own home where Squishy should be and she just…isn’t makes it too fucking hard to forget what happened to her.

In that sense, maybe my complaints about death’s invisibility are shortsighted. Even if the body changes in such an important yet unnoticeable way, the individual’s absence will be felt all the more strongly—proving that it was the person, not their form, that was important all along.

Maybe—I don’t know. I’m just sad my cat’s dead and can’t help but shit out these dumbass thoughts. My brain’s probably gonna be gnawing on these ideas for a while, but I’ve wasted enough time on such esoteric topics with little relation to the novel. Let’s move on.

This chapter rounds off the trio of sections that center around the operations of Lior’s studio. I’ve already talked at length about how I wish I had done a better job of grouping those scenes together, so I’ll focus instead on the story aspects of 22 here.

A lot of writers will tell you this golden rule: get your backstory out of the way as fast as possible. Going over past details tends to slow a story down, so ideally, you’ll shoot them out quickly before proceeding with the main event.

I did not do that here. Chalk it up to naivete.

I think my big problem here is that I came up with a story for each character that I felt had to be told without giving enough thought to placement or timing. Sure, it is interesting to learn that Libi is an orphan who suffers from prosopagnosia, but did that really need to be shared right away? Moreover, did it have to be done in chunky paragraphs that cover several pages, or could I have condensed it down to a few sentences and spread the details out as we continued into the story?

Dunno, but I’d wager the latter would look much better. But, seeing as Varnipast didn’t do that, we get these brick walls.

That’s not to say you should never do long lore sections. Particulars of a story need to be explained as you can’t expect your readers to fill in every blank. But I do think some methods of doing so are better suited to some stories than others. For example, I’m particularly fond of turning lore dumps into conversations, but Carlo Zen of The Saga of Tanya the Evil has no problem spending pages just explaining past military engagements and the intricacies of operation orbs.

What makes all the difference is that Zen’s novels largely consist of paragraphs of description with minimal speech, so their doing so never feels out of place. In comparison—and from my perspective—my work has a sort of wave pattern to it where I shift between hefty descriptive segments and pages of chatter. With that, maybe it makes sense that I’d dump Libi’s backstory like this, considering we’d just had a chapter consisting of one exchange between Lior and Tzofiya, but I still feel I could have done it more concisely.

I’d like to say I’m more aware of this now. My light novel does it best to avoid burdening the flow with lore while my dormant novels have some blocky parts. Whether they’re good or not, I don’t know. Everyday is a lesson, hopefully culminating in my improvement as a writer.

Or maybe I should just say, “Fuck you, it’s my art and you don’t understand it!” That sounds way easier.

Anyways, Libi’s backstory does work double-time as character development for Lior and Hed. Through her history, you get to see a magnanimous side of Lior and the subtle kindness of Hed, sprinkled throughout a (hopefully) entertaining exchange between the studio’s staff. There’s a wonderful GMTK video on dual-purpose design that stuck with me so I try to use aspects of my stories efficiently. Of course, most writers use lore as character development naturally, but I think you can kick it up a notch when you’re actively thinking of how the backstory reflects upon the modern shape of the character.

Let’s see here… Some more Hed jokes, Niv being employee of the month… Yeah, not much more to say. The story hasn’t moved much in three chapters, which I’d now consider abysmal, but I’ll pray that filling in the time-skip has been decently entertaining. Things actually progress next chapter, so at least there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.

Welp, I’m done for now. The world’s been more than a little tiring lately, so I think I’ll game it up a bit before passing out. I finally settled on a main in GBVS (Percival), but then I got the wonderful news that there’s currently no plans to improve the game’s shitty netcode. Kills my motivation to play, but at least Xenoblade got a dope remaster.

Alright, take care. And make sure to appreciate your pets and loved ones.

We’ve only got one shot at this, you know.