The question was also a ‘figure of speech’ – aka, not to be taken as a literal question. The mechanical translation would be: ‘Refer to my quote about the author John Banville in the previous post. I am now about to tell a brief story about him to back up my assertion that by zoning in on minor technical details of a critique/post (rather than the high level point of the critique/post itself), constructive debate is jettisoned in favour of nit-pickery for the sake of one-upmanship and derailment’. But nobody speaks/writes like that in general, and hasn’t this been the issue from the start where you are reading everything people write with unconditional literal-mindedness?
That question is also a ‘figure of speech’ – it’s rhetorical.
Cant help the feeling that you are basicaly asking for Railroading
If that’s what you call character development, subtle build up to big narrative events (lets kill everyone in the grove) and interesting plot development outside of the well-worn fantasy clichés of ‘the dark one (Absolute) will give us immense power!’ I believe she even says something almost exactly along those lines. Let’s find it again because I quoted it the last time this cropped up, too:
‘Tell me what you know. The Absolute will reward us with such power if we find this place.’Every six year old who writes their first fantasy short story has a similar line somewhere about ‘let’s go kill because the dark one will make us magnificent, muhahahahaha!’
it just feels like genuinely bad, incomplete writing in a way I have honestly never encountered in a video game
Well, we’re in agreement there.
It's my position that excising authorial opinion isn't a requirement for a story to be good
On this, we simply have different tastes. These are not the kind of stories I could ever enjoy, but that’s life and entertainment for you. There’s no right and no wrong as to the definition of ‘enjoyment’.
