Status Updates From These Shattered Spires

I have zero sympathy. What did you think would happen when you touched the plant w the corpse in it?

I wish any of these characters were nice ever.

It really feels like we’re depicting kink more than we are offering a portrait of why people make bad decisions.

THIRD SOUP SIMILE. It’s like there’s one every 50 pages!

I don’t think they could even mouth a lot of these sounds without a tongue, sooooo…oops?

At this stage, the 4 protagonists’ motives more or less make sense (except I don’t really buy Elliot’s stubborn disbelief after seeing evidence of the ghost’s claims). What doesn’t make sense is how secondary characters respond to them. Like, why would the librarian rescue Alis(x) and then threatened to throw them out (for ???). Why let Alis live at all, actually, when familiars are clearly disposable?

I still don’t really get how the arcanists exert control over their familiars. Too big a question to leave unanswered this long.

Oof yeah the characters all have clear motivations as least but we’re pushing how long the reader can tolerate bunch of unlikable people.

Unfortunate that Taro’s pansexuality/bisexuality manifests as being constantly horny for everyone.

Weirdly a lot of soup-based figurative language.

Flagging the overuse of the word violence.

Okay, we’re actually getting a lot of explanations—great! I’m hoping we also learn why this mirror that isn’t supposed to be here is here because otherwise it’s sort of deus ex machina.

Blank as mushroom soup????

So far my impression is that it’s front-loaded with densely-packed world-building, and yet there are very few explanations of why the world is this way (teeth in the sky?) or how these powerful familiars are being controlled. At this stage, I’m fine with reading to find out if there will be answers and enjoying (?) the petty, mean characters. But…! We’ll see.