The author has serious writing chops and vast ambition, but this is very much a case of grand ambition causing the work to become bloated and unfocused. Or perhaps the focus is on bloated indulgence. Either case the story suffers from a fair bit of moralizing and navel gazing from an OP broken protagonist who tries his best to extract every possible ounce of forced tension he can in every possible scenario. Its a study in having your cake and eating it too from a writer with the skills to keep you interested in what would be a dumpster fire coming from 97% of the people on this earth.
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LIKEI'll take it! If there is one thing I tend to do is to get bloated and unfocused. I have a habit of making things bigger than they need to be. Once when I was much younger, I had a class project to memorize a poem. Everyone else chose something reasonable and short, five stanzas or so. Not me. I had to memorize the Raven, all eighteen stanzas. Grand Ambition. Itty-bitty attention span. Now I'm a hundred and thirty thousand words into this project, and I keep finding new ideas and crossover potentials. I'm still having fun with it, so that should keep me going pretty well. Thanks for the review. I'll try to have the MC navel gaze a little less. No promises, though.