Jun 03, 2025
To:ArufaBeta
Yaki forcing the confrontation is more supposed to be about no letting Kaburi fall into stagnation, where he's already been for three years at this point. She sees he's finally pushing himself to make strides, but also knows he's prone to falling back when challenged like this, so she's forcing him to maintain his momentum. But also yeah, the chapter end definitely just feels like a plot lead-in, mainly because I rushed it since the chapter was already getting kinda long. I wanna rewrite this story in a conventional novel format with ~10000 word chapters rather than ~1500 word chapters particularly for this reason.
If you do want to get into philosophy, I can't say I'm an expert on the literature but I would genuinely recommend Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. It's verbose and written in an archaic way, but it's very good, and informed a lot of the character writing of this story.
In fact, the writing for all four of the main characters (not counting bitchqueen) is in some way informed by the path to the ubermensch laid out in TSZ. Pep represents the Camel, still shackled by the inherited values of society. Kaburi and Sai are at different stages of the Lion, where Kaburi has fully disavowed those societal principles but is only just working to create his own, while Sai has already constructed some of her own values but has yet to fully embrace them. Yaki is the child, or the final stage of the ubermensch, because she sees through the flaws and contradictions of inherited values and happily replaces them with her own. If you don't know much about the theory of the Ubermensch I imagine none of that makes sense to you but it's a foundational part of the story.
Side note, I don't know why it took me until now to realise it, but you mentioned Voltaire and Candide a few chapters ago, but Candide was written about 100 years before Nietzsche was even born so I don't think Voltaire used it to critique him lol
