Jan 18, 2026
To:Mario Nakano 64
Damn, just realised I totally forgot to respond to this a few days ago.
Huge thanks for reading all the way through, Mario, I seriously appreciate it. I’ll be the first to admit this story is flawed to high hell and desperately needs to be reworked and rewritten, but it’s also one that’s very personal and special to me, so I’m always glad to see someone engage with it.
When I was writing this I saw chess more as a vehicle to flesh out and develop the characters than anything else. That led me to leaving a lot of the games half-finished with the logic of “if they know the critical moments they’ll at least understand what the scene is trying to say.” Having reread those scenes, I no longer think they hold up under that scrutiny. They commit too hard to the chess element to see it as just a character vehicle, while not committing hard enough for it to be a central theme. Outside of tightening pacing and making Ran an actual character, that’ll be my biggest thing to fix if (when) I come back to this.
Sincerely appreciate all the feedback, it’s gonna be a lot of help when I get to redraft this. And again, big thanks for finishing it, it means a lot