@pippychick returns to review Part Six!
Thank you! The torture and mocking line about her going back to Heaven was indeed meant to call back to WoH (even to a specific line of Eparlegna’s), as were the students set up like an audience. When the barrier draws back in WoH, there’s a line about how some of the corpses are posed in grotesque parodies of life, which is what I was going for with the lecture hall.
Is it possible to catch diabetes from sheer cuteness? Because if it is, then baby sloth compilations on Youtube have to be the leading cause. Having said that, the Wrath creature was definitely meant to be as physically intimidating as possible. I think the image I initially had was of a skinless, eyeless polar bear, but then I saw this picture that managed to make Megatherium look unintentionally terrifying, and I realized that if you took the long, curving claws that sloths have and attached them to something really aggressive, they’re suddenly not so cute anymore…
I’m also really glad you liked the way it’s defeated. I couldn’t think of anything as clever as the way Abdul and Calista blow up the Charnel Spider, but thought that since anger is often self-defeating, maybe there was a way for the monster to kill itself, and that even if Kevin was absolutely terrified, he could still have enough presence of mind to make the knock-out-the-pillars plan work.
What’s upsetting her isn’t really what happened in the lecture hall; it’s what happened 75 years earlier. She knows she let Eparlegna rape her again to save Kevin from being skinned alive, but a combination of the experience and the fact that Kevin saw it means that she feels that he now knows what she “did” back in Whore of Heaven, and this has to do with her sense of self-worth and the damage inflicted to it by the torture and rapes she suffered back then.
You noted that she feels more human during the car scene. To some extent, I tend to write her more human from time to time because of the moments in WoH that I really liked, where we learned that Luzurial is actually very relatable in spite of being an archangel (very human, in other words) I try to balance that with her immortality and superhuman nature, but sometimes I lean too far one way or the other.
Partly, though, I think her coming across as more human here is because of the emotionally vulnerable state she’s in at this moment. If I may quote an earlier post of mine in this thread, Luzurial is...
So her sexual experience is a spot in which she is emotionally vulnerable, and I think she reads as more human in this scene because of that vulnerability.
Once again, thank you so much for the review!