#read guys

Today I’ve seen some people criticising a book because the lack of worbuilding (since it only mentioned the elites in a heavy cast system), how one character seemed too awesome to be real and how all in all it seemed more like a fanfic written by a character’s fan rather than a book sequel. And like, these arguments would be taken seriously... If the book was written with an omniscient third person narrator.

But the book is not written like that. It’s written as if the three main characters are telling their memories of a certain event and how did they particpate in that. One of them is a teenager, the other is a young woman victim of a cult and the third one is one of the cult’s high rank officials and is using that testimony to try and save her ass from being imprisoned. And it’s clear by the beginning of the novel that these are the narrators, as the P.O.V.s start as “Transcription of the Testimony of X” or as an diary entry. Only that should make you think that the narrator will not be objective and their critics can easily be explained:

Why it’s only the elite mentioned in the novel? Because the narrators are part of the elites. And they don’t care about the lower classes and have no reason to get involved with them. Why does this character seem to have plot armor and little emotion? It’s a teenager retelling her memories. She might have exagerated some facts and suppresed others Why does these chapters make this character so sympathetic when we know she’s evil by th eprequel? Because those chapters are written with said characters P.O.V., so of course she’s gonna make herself more sympathetic

I Love AO3, I really do. But having AO3 and your only reading platform might make you forget how to comprehend a book by its text alone, since the tags give you clues of what it’s about to happen (”Major character death” warns you, so you spend the book wondering which character might die instead of building the tension if you didn’t know. “Angst with happy ending” relaxes you since no matter what might happen, you know it will have a happy ending. Unless there’s the tag of “unreliable narrator” we assume that we can take what we’re told at face value.)