Review Detail of Laziest_Pillow in Dual Cores: Mage's Conquest

Let's start from the beginning. The story in the first thirty chapters has a grievous case of "tell, not show" from the get-go, the worst offender of this case being chapters 14, 15, and the ones with the MC's journey through the forest. They are not small per se, but they hardly aggregate something, they are all there to tell something but they don't show. MC struggled, but to what? How and why? Where are the scenes, the showing, the proof of his struggles rather than being said by the narrator? It feels cheap and doesn't give the feelings it was meant to convey. Another problem with the start of the story is how everything is simply handed to the MC without price or drawback. Does he want to start a business? His father gives him the money and means without even thinking of refusing because his son is blessed and a genius. The magical soil too, made his brown sugar business work as intended even with the winter knocking on the door. The magical arrows, the whole stuff with Thornwood's army. It feels cheap, the MC succeeding so many times without "struggle" or challenges. They are said to be there, but they do not seem to, they are told to be there, but we can't feel or grasp them, it feels like void, empty challenges rather than something we should keep track of and be worried about. For a good chunk of the first thirty chapters, the MC feels like a cardboard, his emotions are conveyed to us, but as I said above, it feels cheap because of the narrator, we don't get to be in the MC's skin, to see these details first hand, it feels like we are being handed a summary of his adventures, just a resume of everything that is happening. This is made worse by the outbursts he has in one of the earliest chapters, about the slaves' things. I already addressed it in my comment, but I will do so here again: he went to buy slaves, something that is dark and dirty by nature, and he gets mad at knowing their sob stories. That it is not all rainbows and sunshine? Prisoners of war, debt slaves... and then having a public outburst that is out of place for someone trained in royalty affairs. It is very out of place and out of character. This is worsened by the fact the story, later on, tries to paint the MC as someone human and thoughtful when he is just doing the bare minimum for his slaves (Note: Not all slave-centric societies treated slaves the same, some treated them VERY, VERY BAD, inhumanly to the extremes logical limits, while others treated them like the MC), and the issue with burying the corpses of enemy soldiers, when it was common, and accepted to burn them, bury in public graves, or just let them there because of diseases and plagues that could spread, despite the manpower needed for those burials. Credit where credit is due, you have a good flow with words and an extensive vocabulary that enhances your storytelling and the feelings of the story, even if most of it is taken aback by the heavy "tell not show" approach you took with the start of this one. You are good at this and have a good swing with words and synonyms, this gives a unique feeling to your writing. Now, after chapter 30 the story does get better and more serious, as you address the previous issues, adding more "show not tell" to the narrative, and making Nathan feel like a character instead of a caricature of a storyteller, his emotions are more clear and there are challenges, drawbacks, and consequences to his actions and very existence. However, the cartoonishly evil nobles and church are a hindrance, while they are a common trope, and overused, it would be good to get a new feeling about them rather than what we got about them almost always in medieval fantasy stories, but well, this won't be this type of story. Thornwood is far too cartoonishly evil for my tastes, but he does his job well in the story and is the catalyst for the bad events in MC's life, which is good and gives a sense of struggle and empathy towards the MC, since he struggles for real this time around. However the problems do not end here, it is far to convey and believe MC is a 4-6-8 years old when he goes around fighting, training, doing politics, and whatnot, in those tender ages. He was in a battlefield when he was a mere 6-year-old, for God's sake, you need a very high suspicion of belief to get this right because it is something almost impossible to believe in. There were child generals, politics, and royalty, but they always had someone backing them, guiding them for good, bad, evil, or worse, there was someone there giving the actual shots, they weren't leading those people head-on and on their own. With all of those aspects addressed, despite the rocky start, this story has a future, and I may come back to give an updated review when it accumulates more chapters for me to binge-read in one sitting.