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Part Eight has been posted!

Chapter 11 (Who The Fuck Did?) is posted.

IKR? I adore snakes… from a distance. Really, I adore all things with teeth from a distance – including people lol. Fucking with stigmas is fun.

Eh, it’s nothin’ much. The Romans crucified this Jewish carpenter a few thousand years ago, and since there was this thing getting said about him being “King of the Jews” they stuck a crown of thorns on him. Executing that guy...might have backfired a little. In all seriousness, while the crown of thorns isn’t as famous as the cross, for Christians it’s heavily tied to the crucifixion/passion story, so it’s very much linked to the idea of suffering for the sake of others. Here the symbolism is inverted, with others suffering for the King, hence my cringey reaction. True enough. Something I forgot to mention in the review itself is that I like how the religion was corrupted here, since it went from worship of the deity to something more of a cult of personality, with people worshiping the King instead of the goddess he was supposed to be an intermediary for. There really needs to be a facepalm emoji here, but this will have to suffice: I really should have figured out that the drought might have just been a coincidence. Oh well, this is why the forum exists, so I can ask the authors about this stuff! One last thing I forgot to say in the review: I like that you had a snake deity that was benevolent. Snakes, like bugs, often get a bad rap and appear frequently as bad guys in fantasy settings (the Yuan-ti from Dungeons & Dragons, the snake god Yig from the Cthulhu Mythos, etc.), but I’ve always thought they were really cool animals. While they do make for cool villains, it’s nice to see them as good guys here.

Review for Kiss of the Snake @InBrightestDay LOL you certainly win the award for longest review I’ve ever received. That’s awesome. Instead of putting it all here, I’ll just quote the bits I’m responding to directly! I admit, I’m not entirely familiar with the religious significance. I’m aware there is some of course, but I was raised atheist and have never been all that interested in learning religious stuffs, so I’m quite ignorant on what that significance is. I like that it had a strong cringey reaction for you though, because it was meant to represent a lot of things I find problematic with power as it stands in this story. Like Sadism and entitlement. I think it’s kinda in between. Like he believed in Serpentina, but though the consort thing started as a scam, he slowly grew to believe his own lies over the years. Hard not to! Everyone else did! Corine was unlucky. I don’t really go into it in the story, but the drought was completely natural, she just happened to be born at the start of it, and the toxic powers and the superstitions of the people twisted that coincidence into something they believed was evil. You’re right tho, that Corine was born to right the wrongs, she just had to find out she could do it first! This was my intention for it anyway, lol. I’m glad you liked the story! Don’t worry, I didn’t take anything you said in the review as negative – since this story is so thick with political messages for me, which I’ve been dying to do for ages – I enjoy the opportunity to talk it out with someone. So thank you for the encouraging review!

I’d imagine that in her true form she probably doesn’t have primary sex characteristics, so asexual would be my description. Awkward moment. Still, we know from You! that her personality isn’t changed so much as to be unrecognizable, so it’s character development rather than derailment, thankfully. I’m afraid to ask, but a part of me really wants to. True, but the first step to becoming a better person is realizing you have a problem, and this is probably as direct a way of showing him that as possible. I don’t think it’s pretentious at all. This is the place where you can fully explain, as you said, your thoughts on the story and the ideas behind it, and I’m always glad to hear them.

Jude’s Tale is nearing it’s end with two parts to go. Unless the next part gets split into seperate parts in which case three. That’s not the plan, but there’s already been two non-original-plan parts, with a third one now planned for the final part so… Ayyy. Thank you for your review! I love that there’s some depth and thought provoking stuff in there. Heh, I did have some more Star Trek refs in the original draft, but cut ‘em all for space with only the passing red shirt reference left. Hell, it was a bit of a repeated theme in Star Trek, besides that one around Data’s rights, they later had an actual Artificially intelligent gynoid in “The Offspring” (I mean the Data’s daughter episode, not the 90s pop-punk act), and besides TNG’s moriarty stories, hologramatic life and sentience were big in Voyager. Kizurial would definitely be aware of all that I guess it’s pretty much like Kizzy says, Kizurial and her Angel assistant did such a good job that the mask can pass properly for life. Jude certainly seems convinced. Of course, as another part of Kizurial’s plan for Jude, then having the construct act and feel that way could still be entirely artificial. But going to “I think, therefore I am.” The mask Kizzy certainly thinks she is thinking… I wonder if this, done as a reactive plan to the Void Blade could cause problems for Kizurial down the road… the re-absorbed mask persoanlity and thoughts coloring Kizurial’s own more than when she was able to just draw on them to act similar to a mortal (and she still had trouble with that in her early days on Earth). I love this one, because it implies that Jude has an idea of what being dead would feel like. He’s walking and talking so the obvious thought is “I feel alive!” but Jude went the wrong way there for sure. No doubt with some funeral mental images. Heh. Thanks! That's just a hilarious way of describing Shannon, frankly. Actually, while the borrowed memories would naturally include a sexual orientation, that has to be a somewhat confusing experience for Kizurial, since I'd imagine she didn't really have a sexual orientation before. I wonder what that's like for her. Thanks again! I figured that as a Seraph, Kizurial was probably too far removed from humanity, unlike a Luzurial or Chastia type, to see them in a sexual way any more than she would other mortal sentient species. She was probably effectively asexual even, with affection and compassion and so on, but no sexual desires in that sense. Now there’s a place where more insistant thoughts from the re-merged mask part of her could color her thoughts. She totally ignored any attracting thoughts of Jude’s appearance when she first met him, but now, if a guy with an actual decent personality (or a terrible bad guy genuinely seeking redemption and reforming) flirted with her… Oh, god, I just had an awful inappropriate thought for I! if I manage to write it… Thank you again! Yeah, he’s even felt the pain of the Void Blade’s version of unmaking already – it’s not just existentially terrifying, it really fucking hurts body and soul– but he’s reached the stage where he’ll take that over sinking any lower. It doesn’t get rid of his guilt, or make him any better of a person – and Kizzy snapping at him is me trying to make it clear that it doesn’t really make amends even if she finally accepts his apology – but it does show some good in there. If the whole chapter was Kizurial testing Jude to see how dedicated he was to being decent person, he passed… Is it pretentious that my replies to reviews seem to end up longer than the story parts? I think maybe it’s because you’re writing in the shared universe I like to expand on my thoughts around it, even in reply to other reviews, or more like I just like rambling on. Probably that.