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Hiero's Journey - 2. The factions
Several different factions, human and otherwise, are identified. An incomplete list would include the human cultures from which Hiero and Luchare originated, the Unclean, the Eleveners, the Bear Old Ones, the (Beaver) Dam People, and so on. Which seemed credible or the opposite?
Comments
As I mentioned in Q1, the Metz, the Eleveners, and the Bear People seemed the most credible to me. The tendency to simply write off the Unclean as 'evil villains' was too simplistic for my taste. Aldo ascribes a motive to them that doesn't come across at all in the rest of the book. Everyone else is too peripheral to really form much of an impression of.
The Metz, Eleveners, and Unclean were all based heavily on tropes. I think that was the right approach for this book, as it was literally based on Hiero's journey through the wilderness. None of the societies were what I would call rich or nuanced, so I would expect any more detailed exploration of them to show some more complexity.
What we got in the book are the stories people tell about the different cultures, not the cultures themselves. And that's fine!
The factions were the least interesting of anything in this book. They were straight up cartoonish tropes. As others have said, that's fine, as this book isn't about the factions. i just wonder that you selected factions as a topic of interest!