Dec 04, 2024
To:lolitroy
That's definitely an issue with Cat-Eared mage. I'm hoping to run a bit of a tighter ship on this one, but sometimes outcomes don't meet expectations.
I'm wasn't trying to argue with you, btw. I was just trying to suss out where the disconnect is. Like, you can have this story and world in your head, but you can't lore-dump everything to a reader, so you have to try to figure out which details to include and which to hold back in order to communicate what you need to.
This often gets phrased as advice that the reader doesn't necessarily need to know the details of the world as long as the character does. But this can backfire I think if the world doesn't come off as believable to the reader. In my mind, finding a smartass in the sticks who knows the terminally online slang is believable because when I was stuck in the sticks, that's who I was. I didn't want to be there an felt stuck among people I didn't want to be around, so I dialed long-distance into BBSs in San Francisco.
So in that way, Sprout is based on a younger me. But if you don't have that experience, I can see how she's not a believable character.
