Oct 03, 2026
Feedback #17
Okay, there's something I would like to point out here.
Sometimes I forget that Yui is trying to be incognito. I think I've mentioned this before, but let me briefly bring it up again.
Yui has her own goals as a Yudari, which are centered around promoting peace. So when things happen to her and people like the Duke apologize to her, I, as the reader, can sometimes become a bit confused. For example, I found myself wondering whether the Duke was apologizing because he understood and supported Yui's goals as a Yudari, or because he simply saw she was a human that was being inconvenienced by their discussion of war. I hope that makes sense.
And this connects to something I've mentioned before: how hostile is this world actually supposed to be? Is the relationship between the Yudari and humans relatively peaceful now, with no lingering threats of war, or are hostilities gradually growing?
You did a great job showing the peacefulness, but the narration also hints at something very different through things like Lullaby's sabotage of factories and the reasons she's wanted. It's understood that she does these things to slow down potential war efforts, right? But we don't really see those tensions happening in the present.
We see the ghosts of past conflicts, like when she was in the cemetery and learned about everything that happened before, but we never really see the humans actively trying to start something new.
I think if the narration found more ways to subtly remind us of those tensions and show some of those things happening, it would land a lot better. It would also make Yui's goals as both a human living in disguise and a Yudari trying to promote peace much easier to understand.
Because right now, I sometimes lose sight of the fact that she's actually in disguise. Like we saw earlier with the Yudari woman selling food in the shop, nobody seems particularly hostile toward her. Nobody is trying to run her out of town, shut down her business, or otherwise make her life difficult because she's Yudari.
If there were more subtle signs of that hostility, I think Yui's situation would become much clearer.
Right now, the main reason Yui seems to be hiding is because of her identity as Lullaby, rather than simply because she's a Yudari. That makes sense, but I sometimes lose track of the distinction between Yui the human persona, Yui the Yudari, and Yui the singer known as Lullaby.
Because her motivation remains the same, and we hardly ever see her actively sabotaging anything or causing the destruction of human properties that are being used to prepare for war, it's difficult to differentiate between her different personas.
We mostly just see one Yui: the Yui who lives her everyday life with her family.
I think showing more of those sides of her would make the distinction much clearer and help us understand that, even though they're all the same person, Yui is balancing different identities and goals at the same time.
Anyway, this was another solid chapter that helped clarify the situation with the noble. It also showed that not everyone has a war-hungry mindset and that the Duke is more open to the possibility of peace talks in the future, which I really liked.
I think scenes like this are especially useful because they show that if the Yudari were suffering in certain ways, the Duke might actually be more willing to lend a helping hand. So if Yui eventually reveals her true identity to him as Lullaby and as a Yudari, there's already a foundation for him to understand where she's coming from.
...
Oh, and before I end this segment, there's one major clarification I need to understand.
It seems like at some moments I might have forgotten that the narration is hinting that the main struggle, the core issue behind the conflict, is actually resources, as Mara also highlighted in the comments.
If that's the case, then you can ignore parts of my feedback in this chapter and the previous one. A lot of what I mentioned was based on the idea that the conflict was primarily some kind of racial issue rather than a conflict over resources.
So you can take the parts of my feedback that you feel would benefit your intention of having the conflict be resource-based and leave out the parts that mainly apply to a racial conflict.
But in future stories, I think things like this should be constantly reinforced in subtle ways so the reader doesn't easily lose sight of what the main issue behind the war actually is.
That's why I loved Chapter 10 so much. If that had been the beginning, it would have told us almost everything we needed to know right from the start: that there was a history of conflict between the humans and the Yudari, and that this small girl was at the center of it, defending her people.
That chapter did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of explaining the world and the conflict. In my opinion, it would have been a great introduction to the world, and every slice-of-life moment that came afterward could have served as a slower expansion and discovery of Yui and the world around her.
Anyway, excellent job, Momo!
