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Notes -
I wish Anna was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl fucks you. Anna is just a bitch.
But the biggest problem with Unsong is that Aaron is a pussy. He is not brave or manly. He has very little agency; things happen to him. By the end of the story, he has become an observer to the Cometspawn, who are the ones actually moving the plot forward. He's got yandere Buffy throwing herself at him and he still holds out for Ms. Lets-just-be-friends. This is someone else's story; Aaron is just along for the ride.
The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.
Other problems: Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations, Kabbalism is a lackluster magic system.
Still, I think Unsong has a lot of really cool ideas (the Comet King is fucking awesome). There is the core of a good story there, even if the execution is badly flawed. I think if you gave it to a more talented rational fiction author to rewrite, like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Alexander Wales, you would get something truly wonderful.
Yes, thank you, you put it into words. No accident that the protagonist names his laptop after the Buffy the Vampire Slayer desktop that adorns it, so much of the dialogue has that "quippy" Whedon quality I find so grating. "Wouldn't it be funny if Christian archangels communicated like annoying teenagers on Tumblr?" Not especially, Scott, no.
I actually don't mind this too much, I think it contributes to the sense of the fictional universe being huge and epic in scope. Although perhaps it might have been a bit less disorienting if there had been two chapters in the present-day A-story, then jumping back in time to provide backstory, then jumping back to the A-story for two more chapters etc.
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