Jan 01, 2025
To:lolitroy
Sincerely, thank you, thank you for posting this and not deleting it. As I always say, all feedback and criticism is welcome. I'm trying to improve as a writer, and I will take what I can from this for future endeavors.
And also I want to apologize if I leaned into the bit about taking pleasure in your negative emotional reactions to the story on Discord. I do want readers to have emotional reactions to my writing, because it shows I wrote something they care about, and I'm especially glad I have you at least one thing to think about with the story, but I also want to write something people enjoy, something they keep reading because they want to. It's complicated. I guess I can say I'm happy you found parts of it frustrating, but I'm also sorry that it was bile fascination driving you to keep reading at the end.
If I can be completely honest for a second, I don't like Sprout either, but probably for slightly different reasons: Sprout was me. I also don't like Ashtin, but Ashtin was always the person I could have been. Sprout is the person I used to be.
Perhaps she would be more understandable or sympathetic if I had shown more of how she was ostracized by the village prior to blowing it all up, but i had two problems with that. First, I wanted that bit of doubt that comes from it being described only through her voice. The other characters don't see her treatment that way, except for Oliver, but only after she pushes him to see it that way. Communal relationships are not always one-sided, and I wanted readers to ask if perhaps it was a much her fault as the other villagers'. I went through a similar period as a teenager—lots of people do—but it took me a long time to see that I was holding others at arm's length just as much as they were me.
I still do that, if I'm being honest about it, but I'm not angry about it anymore. I'm more at peace with being an antisocial introvert.
Second, I didn't want readers to empathize with Sprout too much for this story. She can be an interesting character to observe, but not one I wanted people identifying with.
With more words, you're right, I would have had sappy flashbacks: Lea and Apollo being trained as child soldiers and Oliver becoming increasingly unable to deal with the stresses of city life. Apollo also originally got killed a lot earlier, but I removed an entire mini arc to meet the contest deadline.
If there's one bit of feedback from your post I think is more important than others, it's the fantasy racism aspect. I was not attempting to depict the fantasy racism as being justified. Quite the opposite, I was trying to show that Sprout was dangerous not because she was a catgirl, but because she was dismissive of others and always in her own head overthinking things, plus, she learned to be an incredibly efficient killer and has lived experiences that make her more likely to lash out violently against perceived threats. I will need to carefully consider how to avoid that mistake going forward.
When you asked about Call of the Wild on Discord, I honestly panicked a bit. I didn't want to give away the direction the ending took. I hope my answer was elusive enough.
And thank you for saying that the ending worked. The transitions were rough. It was one of the reasons I had such a hard time writing the ending. Perhaps I should have gone with my other contest idea. It would have made for a much more straightforward ending, but we're here now. I can't undo what I've done now anymore than Sprout can bring her friends back to life.
I definitely wanted to avoid the cliché "everyone is an individual" conclusion, but Sprout's final epiphany is about more than that. She has had *some* realizations, but she is cocky, overconfident that she can shape the world how she wants it, and trying to paper over an extreme desperation for belonging. It's why she falls so quickly into the idea of hunting the remaining militants, because she feels like it's activity where she fits in. The farmer plows the field because he is meant to. She kills militants because she is meant to.
It sets up a potential sequel where she sets out on her mission, perhaps with her mother and Luna tagging along, where she gets humility knocked into her and realizes that she's done nothing but destroy, leaving her life empty until she can find a way to make peace with others as much as her self, and learns to create positivity rather than to merely fight against negativity.
