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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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The apocalyptic nightmare scenarios of his books are fine; it’s seeing shitty people make worse interpersonal decisions that gets to me. Whichever protagonist has the narcissistic but useless dad, I did not want to deal with that.

Interesting. I agree to an extent but then after a certain point I just write those characters off. Verona's dad became less of a character to me and more of an obstacle, so it was easy to mostly ignore all of his terrible behavior. Much worse to me is when the main characters make bad decisions.

But I’d be more interested in seeing a post about all the reasons it works rather than the reasons Ward and/or Pale didn’t

I think the biggest reason is simply that the characters and dialogue got a LOT of attention. Pale seems to have better worldbuilding in many ways, and more interesting ideas, and a more coherent and interesting plot, as well as a more fleshed-out setting, so for those reasons I prefer it to Twig. Twig, though, did have an absolutely fantastic main character, with extremely engaging dialogue, motivations, and character growth throughout the story. I think it was simply the better-written story, it's just that it had less of what I want from a story (compelling ideas competently explored).