Quote Originally Posted by Typewriter View Post
Does anyone else feel like the pacing feels really weird the last few chapters? Pretty much ever since Loup appeared everything has felt very... temporary. Loup is here, there's a battle starting, Annie is split into two distinct beings. All that is happening but now we're just sort of pausing for this scene.
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I don't feel like I'm describing my thought very well, but does anyone sort of understand what I'm trying to say? I'm still enjoying it but for the first time in the years that I've been reading GC I feel rather detached from the majority of the story.
I think one of the big things is that we have no idea where we are going, in terms of scope, process, or even what we're addressing. Now it's usually not a great thing to know ahead of time what will happen in a story, but you do usually* kind of want to know what the rest of the story will likely be addressing (say, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, we are going after the Ark, and not building into a WWII war movie, or the like). Since returning from the forest (again), it sounds like the main protagonist group is trying to get Loup the other lost memory of Coyote back to placate him. Up until then, we didn't even know if they were going to acquiesce to Loup or try to defeat him. Is the court being helpful? What's the deal with the robots, and who is right about how best to use them?
*Exceptions and subversions exist, and of course there's always the movie/show/book that you thought was going to be a murder mystery, and then you find out that the victim faked their death to help rob a casino and it's really a crime caper, but those have to be the exception for them to be the one with the twist.

Mind you, all of these things are needed in a story (including not knowing what's going on), but that is part of the set-up, and more than a year into this arc, it's a little surprising to still be groping about in the dark, feeling for the walls in an attempt to define the boundaries of the story.