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A Max- Earth lawyer? Now that fascinates me. Also the Subcontinent Freedom movement. I think I know what that's about if I remember my geography right, but I could be wrong...

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Always fun to drop one-liner hints. Lazy world building, but it works!

The complexity of law in the triverse must be intense. Not only countries with different setups, but also the three universes, and how they all interact.

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The conflict checks alone would be *INSANE*.

(That's my particular line of work, is why I thought of it).

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Holland is never pleasant to be in. Fortunately, as the nice guy you are you never revel in his mindset, but, in some ways the subtlety makes it/him worse. Yup, I'm referring to the back-to-back paragraphs of disgust with cultural trappings, but being a "connoisseur" of skin shades. Ugh. Slimy.

"And then he’d be on his own again."

Right. I've been so excited for Lola returning to Palinor (septuple-time for "descended from Palinor!"), that I haven't considered the impact on her co-workers, so that one-line paragraph was a quick punch in the feels. While Triverse is largely written as an ensemble, in many ways I've latched onto Clarke as our "protagonist," and I don't want the old man to suffer more emotional shocks.

Any other comments or observations I'd have made thus week you touched in the Author's Note, so I'll just smile and nod at "techno-mage," and agree about SF/Fantasy having value in its ability to serve as allegory for real world issues, c.f. original Star Trek, Doctor Who (especially the Graham Williams years) and, as always, Babylon 5. I guess this arc is going to end up being the most uncomfortable in Triverse so far, and you've already broken a teen girl's pelvis during a sexual assault.

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Yeah, Holland is a weird one. Uncomfortable to write, uncomfortable to read. But I also don't want to reduce him to a caricature or an outright 'bad guy'. There's a bit more to him than that, even if a lot of his attitude is reprehensible. It's an interesting challenge.

Agree that Clarke has settled into a leading role. It's a 4-way show between him and Lola, and Chakraborty and Kaminski. Of the 4, Clarke and Lola have probably had the most attention. One day I'll write something that isn't a large ensemble...

An aspect B5 did so well is never settling into a status quo for long. Keeping things moving around ensures character development, I find. Thus, Lola aiming for her new role: if she gets it, that's built-in character stuff for her and Clarke, and it'll inevitably shake up some of the narrative conventions of the book so far, too. Exciting!

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Holland is very real. There are quite a few people I know who are, overall, quite lovely, but marred by certain biased/prejudiced attitudes. Which can be frustrating or distressing. Particularly in friends of decades. Holland has his redeeming characteristics.

Character evolution is good. Another aspect of the personality matrix I don't remember if we've discussed, but, events that cause a switch to "flip" should happen on-page. In the RPG roots of the matrix, anything that causes a PC to flip one satisfies one of several Ignobles/Exploits/XP.

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