#im sure a lot more thoughts will be percolating onto the surface in the oncoming days

[fipindustries]

Far away from everything

well, here we are at last.

i worked tirelessly as i read this story for 7 consecutive years every other month, going over it again and again, peering through its dense words and paragraphs, in order to share every thought i could muster about it as i read it because i knew my maind was probably not going to be able to observe it all in one grasp once i reached the end.

consequently i lavished praised over it, because this masterpiece is praise worthy. i concocted evermore exultant flattery, reaching paroxisms of fervent fanaticism scarcely seen outside of evangelist circles and fanfic spaces.

the result of this is that i might have ran out a bit of good things to say about this book and was left only with the things that i didnt like as much, which is a pity because is going to make it seem as if my final tally of this story is a negative one and it very much is not. you can pour all over the 14 pages in my blog under the almost nowhere tag, to see how highly i think of this work.

but, as ratleak dogmatizes, one must follow the straight and narrow path wherever it may take. so, with that said

the third section of this book is the weakest, im sad to say. you might have noticed if you follow my blog closely that as we neared the end i started to fall more and more behaind with the publication rythm of this story. you might have even noticed how long it took since it officially ended and the time i actually bothered to sit down and read it all.

i would say is too much of a good thing. that it hit the maximum it could reach in my scale of greateness and then after a while it became repetitive. i would go back to it every time and, oh surprise, here it is, the greatest work of fiction i've ever came across, still as great as ever.

rob said how he found the last section of this book the most tiresome to get through, how he had to push himself through a massive sense of anhedonia in order to get through it, how the only thing that motivated him was sheer responsability to his audience and his own desire to have a finished work. i was able to tell this.

the last section gets a bit repetitive and it drags. it became saturating in fact, emotions did not let go for 60k words, alarm bells and claxons constatly screaming "THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT MOMENT, THIS IS THE CLIMAX, THIS IS THE MOMENT EVERYTHING GOES DOWN" for the length of what would be a standard novel. it wears thin. i can only sit though so many scenes of Sylvester loosing all hope and doing some ultimate gesture of final doom and then grant or lucifer say something moving or touching or inspiring or naive and then sylvie whiplashes again into benevolent omnipotent mania.

i can read the word love only so many times before it kind of loses its impact a bit, before it starts to sound robotic and rote. i see, eleven, yeah you truly love everyone, i get it, and you too animals, and silvye too, anyone else feeling omnibenevolent today? please make a line so we can reach the ending in orderly fashion.

the stakes got a little lost for a while, and the scale and the mundanity under which this world operates felt flimsy. i dont want this to sound like the typical "aragorn's tax policy" critique but i was wondering a lot of the times "where do these people live? how do they get food? or supplies? does sylvie just wills it all from thin air? how is the world outside? where are the other humans? what are they doing? are there still cities out there? has there been disasters with all of humanity contained in crash pods somewhere in asia? what of the worlds infrastructure? its ecology? how much work are the shades doing or not doing as it were the case to maintain it all?"

it also felt all a bit too stagey, like the entire world was revolving around our small cast of characters in its own little stage and the rest of humanity and the shades and the everywhere heraver is loosely sketched out at best just so we know it exists but they are merely suggestions, just a nod to the idea that, yes there is a world outside of whatever the camera is immediatly watching, and there are people out there doing their own things. but in this it was rather similar to homestuck and i dont think im going to hold it too hard against it, even though it did bother me a bit in homestuck as well.

overall i would need to read some guide or some deconstruction or some analisis to fully appreaciate what really happened it the end, i think i managed to follow well enough to frankly it was a struggle at times and by the very end i was just nodding along in a "sure, whatever you say buddy" way just to get it over with.

many have said that, much like floornight is rob's evangelion and arguably northern caves is rob's house of leaves, this is definetly rob's homestuck and i guess it feels appropiate that it final stretch reflects hoemstuck's final stretch as well.

i would have liked a final epilogue where we get a well established final shot of our beloved characters doing their own thing for us to know that once this is done they will be fine enough. we sort of had that here but it sneaked up on me frankly. it was missing the classic nostalgebraist final chapter where its just dialog with no description where things take a more relaxed sensual tone and the atmosphere is that of an orgy about to begin or just having finished. (although such a thing might be redundant, one of these days im going to draft a graph depicting the insane polycule these people form, 27 sleeping with azad who slept with grant, who slept with cordelia who slept with 27, who slept with azad, who slept with 25, who slept with hector, and so on and so forth).

ultimatly these are all the kinds of things to be expected of a first draft, the masterpiece is still very much here, and regardless of what my opnions are on the final stretch, much like with worth the candle, everything that came before is made no less of a masterpiece for it.

this, out of everything ive read online, is the thing that i will move heaven and earth for in order to have a physical copy of, even if i have to print one myself.

still very much on the top 5 best books ive ever read in my entire life. still a show of what true great prose can be like, still the thing that did the things it did like no other thing did before. i can rest assured that in the oncoming years and i percolate more and more on it its flaws will receede into the realm of the irrelevant and its strengths will shine stronger than ever. cant wait to re read it all someday, this time all in one sitting.

a true 9/10