Thread:Sakaros/@comment-29301-20180903145046/@comment-29301-20190328172622

As usual, I can't pace myself, so I finished The Liberator much earlier than I'd meant to.

The battlefield minutiae, the political intrigue, side-characters coming back, I love that shit. There's so much of it that I could barely even keep track of it all as I read it; I just enjoyed taking it chapter by chapter and watching all these different personalities bounce off each other. It's kind of impressive in hindsight, how the story kept me interested even though actual, direct confrontations between the heroes and villains are few and far between.

I have to ask, just how in the hell did you even write this story? With the two parallel narratives, I mean. Did you always intend to have it this way, with the text shuffling back and forth between past and present, or was that a later development? And what order did you write the chapters in - one narrative and then the other, or in the same order as they're in now? And good grief, all those subplots - if you told me to write this story, my brain would explode.

I think it's good that the story ends with such a twist of the knife as it did - especially since it doesn't end with something cataclysmic happening to Milagro like Gasald returning to take it back (which for all I knew could have been in store, given how long the story is). I don't believe for a second that Aldayr's dead, though. If I was gonna place a bet, I'd say Aresh's captured him (like how I thought happened in Desperate Times, before it turned out to be Kai Latra).

I like the choices you made about what Jedi morality issues to bring up, like whether they can execute prisoners or enemies who are already mortally wounded. On a similar note, regarding the Aldayr-and-Narasi-sitting-in-a-tree thing: this was a good time to move that subplot forward a step, and it's slightly impressive that you figured out a way to do that without Narasi even being present in the narrative. The way Mali backs Aldayr up fits with his character as we've seen (even as he was before he's established as a bit of a transgressor himself), and I can't tell you how relieved I am that the handling of the issue doesn't come across as a one-sided filibuster, as I've so often seen in fan fiction in years past.

That's all I've got... Hoping the next one'll be a little shorter, though. :P