Cat + Gamer, Volume 2
It turns out that cat drawings are also very appealing to me.
Reminder to self: Write a post-apocalyptic novel where all the cats suddenly vanished overnight. Society collapses. People good at drawing cats become insanely wealthy and powerful. Cat photos become the new currency.
Giganto Maxia
I’m not as into wrestling, but Kentaro Miura’s artwork NEVER disappoints. What can I say, I’m in love. If I was head over heels for someone and they loved wrestling and we had to watch wrestling every week (is that how often wrestling happens?), that’d seem like no biggie.
Isn’t it funny how when you’re young, someone liking a shitty band is a dealbreaker, at least in your head, and then when you get older, you’re like, “Who gives a shit?”
Some may feel it’s a lowering of standards. I feel like it’s acknowledging reality. Because, in reality, if some hot babe approached me at age 20 and was like, “I’m a huge wrestling fan, we will have to watch it for two hours every night, however, check out this hot bod,” I would’ve been like, “Yep, I can see a future for us together.”
If some lady now is like, “Hey, I love something you don’t, but we can date for the next 10 years and maybe have like 4 or 5 minor conflicts in that entire timespan,” I’d be like, “SOLD.”
So I guess what I’m saying is that Kentaro Miura is my hot babe who is obsessed with wrasslin’, and I am more than mature enough to deal with that.
I Luv Halloween vol. 1
This book has a BIG speech balloon problem. There’s no consistent order, so sometimes it’s whichever balloon is higher goes first (regardless of left/right orientation), and sometimes it’s left/right, regardless of height.
There’s very little more frustrating in reading comics than reading a speech balloon, being a little confused, then reading the next speech balloon, realizing you read them in the wrong order, and then repeating that process throughout the entire book.
I have my preferences for speech balloon order, but I can hang with anything so long as it’s pretty consistent. So you can either engage in the mysterious art of making it super intuitive, which is a mastery of the form, OR you can make it super consistent, which creates the same effect, albeit while making some sacrifices in the art here and there.
Which is, I think, what was going on with this book: they had a SUPER talented artist with an interesting style, and that overrode all other considerations for the book. I kind of get it, but at the same time, each panel of this book was like my own personal Memento moment where I was reconstructing the story’s order all the time, so the art was awesome, but it felt like it was a beautiful mural on the side of a porta potty.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Vol. 1
This is fine, a little like a sitcom pilot where it seems like the idea is still finding its footing.
The premise is pretty good, a guy is reincarnated into a fantasy world, but instead of being like a warlord or a skilled elf or whatever, he’s reincarnated as a slime, which is generally a weak, ineffectual creature in fantasy settings, to my understanding.
It’s kind of funny to watch a slime sort of bumble through a bunch of situations, but maybe it’s just not quite funny enough for me.
Whoever came up with fighting slimes in RPGs is both a genius and a terrorist. It’s super simple, so that makes it pretty easy for game designers, but my god does it get boring fast.
Someone needs to make a game called World of Slimes where you fight ONLY slimes. You level up and it gets easier and easier to the point of slimes being a complete annoyance who really can’t possibly kill you, and yet, still more slimes.
Yes, someone should definitely take the time to program a game because I think it has a funny premise.
Uzumaki
Probably Junji Ito’s best in terms of being one long, coherent story where all the pieces fit together and things go from bad to worse to worse to worser to worstest.
Something Junji Ito does really well is diving into the horror where the folks involved are deliriously happy. The characters who are evil or who are transformed or whatever are going through these nightmarish things, but it’s mostly, sort of, something they WANT to do, and I think that’s a scary concept that’s rarely explored.
In slashers, for example, it doesn’t seem that Jason is particularly tickled by killing, or Michael Myers. Freddy is the closest, and even he seems like he’s in it for revenge, and at some point, he’s like, Okay, time to finish this kid off. Freddy knows what he’s doing is evil, where the characters in a Junji Ito horror comic seem to often not see themselves as the bad guys at all, and instead they’re like, “I know this looks freaky, but it’s amazing, my life is much better now!”
It’s a strange kind of horror, but I like it. It solves a lot of motive problems you see in horror movies where we’re limited to the concepts of revenge or “he just kills people because he kills people.”
Sneeze: Naoki Urasawa Story Collection
It’s always good to prepare for what you would do if you met The Beatles…
Not that it’s likely I’ll travel back in time, but you never know.
I’d definitely turn it into a money-making scheme, have them sign a pack of notecards or something? A bunch of vinyl records?
Maybe I’d try and figure out the deal with Yoko Ono. There’s been a recent spate of Yoko cultural reevaluation that I’m not really buying into. There have been a lot of artsy types who didn’t get their due because they were ladies, but I’m not so sure that Yoko Ono A) hasn’t got her due and B) has produced a body of work in need of analysis.
She definitely got some unfair blame for breaking up the Beatles (even if she played a part, Lennon made the choice, ultimately). But we all live our versions of that: My mom still blames me for bottle rockets that were shot off in the garage, and it was DEFINITELY my brother, and why he won’t fess up to it 30 years later is very baffling to me.
Maybe I’d ask the Beatles to drive me to my house, witness my brother shooting off those bottle rockets, and then write a song about it, or add a liner note in a record so that my mom would HAVE to buy my side of the story.
Knights of Sidonia 1
This is a book with lots of good ideas, and probably the least good idea is people fighting monsters in mech suits, and it seems to be a primary focus.
I don’t know where that leaves me and this book, but it’s not looking good.
I do like the idea of mech suits fighting things, though. It’s incredibly impractical, which is why it’s awesome. Maybe it’s because we live in the age of drones, so it’s easy to be like, “Why would you do all the work to make a bipedal, humanoid robot when you could just have a weird lil helicopter airplane guy blow things up?
But there’s a good answer: Because nobody wants to watch that, stupid. You little dumbass. Idiot. DumDum.
後遺症ラジオ 1 [Kouishou Radio 1]
The stories are super short and mostly not connected, except when they are, I dunno. I guess that’s not what I was expecting, which, from the book’s description, seems fair? Because the description doesn’t, you know, describe?
I get the idea of doing a book description that is already weird, leading people into the weirdness early, but I think this book would probably attract its audience and confuse fewer people if it had a description. On one hand, I, as someone who screws around with writing things, can appreciate the idea of making this a cursed object in every possible way, including a description that appears to have been written by some kind of ghoul. On the other hand, as a reader, it’s a bit of a waste of my time when I end up on books that aren’t going to be to my taste, and it was difficult to learn this fact via the provided info.
Tomahawk Angel Volume 1
There are monsters, and we don’t know how. That’s…about all we get in this first volume.
Amnesia is not my favorite plot trick. It has its uses, god knows, but it’s just so vague and I think it should only be used briefly, not as the setup for a whole thing. I understand it’s helpful because then we, the reader, can have everything explained like we’re idiots, and it still feels sort of natural. But I think I’d prefer an alternative method more often.
You know what I would like, though? A machine that would cause you to forget specific books or TV shows or whatever. Then you could watch them again for the first time! Wouldn’t that be great?
I mean, sometimes it would suck, because sometimes I think I’d like the memory of watching something more than watching it again. But DAMN would it be handy if you cheated and watched a new episode of Bake Show before your partner.
What’s the protocol for you all in that scenario? I’m of the “just fess up” school of thought. It’s really not THAT big a deal, it’s not like I’m going to be furious or anything. I’d rather you just tell me you had a moment of weakness and watched a show without me rather than pretending like everything is happening for the first time. OR, the only other option, you must never admit you watched it before. Never, ever. Those are really the only two choices.
神さまの言うとおり弐 1 [Kami-sama no Iu toori Ni 1]
One of my favorite genres, people trapped in a bad situation, looking for a way out.
My favorite part was probably that the one loser guy gets picked up by a robot, and halfway to the destination, realizes he got on the robot wrong, so he’s the only one facing backwards while everyone else is facing the right way. Perhaps this will be an important story point later, but I’m hopeful it’s simply that this dumbass did something that seemed reasonable at the time, then he realized it was all wrong.
I felt very seen.
ワンパンマン 2 強さの秘訣 [One Punch Man 2: Tsuyosa no Hiketsu]
It only took me eight years to get back to this one. Worth the trip.
I laughed several times at this one, it’s just so goddamn absurd, and I don’t know why, but something about the main character, the most dangerous man on the planet, also looking so silly just really pleases me.
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead
Volume 5
There’s always that one guy in the zombie movie who can’t just hang out at the mall and enjoy this new life where you never have to go to work again.
What’s with that guy?
Like the bikers in Dawn of the Dead. I guess it kind of makes sense if we assume that bikers are already, pre-zombie, living the life they want to. Maybe bikers prefer the zombie world? Maybe this is better for them? I’m not sure I really believe that, but hey, my experience with bikers is not vast, so I’m not the right person to ask. I just sort of think that even a hardened biker, if they came upon a mall with working toilets, might be like, “Whoa, hold on, boys. Maybe we should go ahead and trash EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD and leave this place, and its functioning shitters, intact?”
Volume 6
An overanalysis of this series would have to ask the question: Are zombies more interested in a naked man’s admittedly juicy ass than they are in more run-of-the-mill “foods?” Because that seems to be the implication, however it could just be that the naked man in question just enjoys displaying his juicy ass (who wouldn’t, with an ass like that!?) and is the only one insisting on repeating this trick.
My only hope is that hundreds of years from now, instead of analyzing Shakespeare, scholars are analyzing Zom 100 and getting to the root of these important questions.
Volume 7
This series is just fun to read, and Akira is the person you want around during the zombie apocalypse: he absolutely refuses to have a lousy time. It’s just not in his nature. I don’t know that it’s possible for him to be a downer.
He’s definitely that friend that pulls people together, has great ideas, and makes the world a more interesting place, even when it should be horrible.
It’s the person I aspire to be: when you’re stuck in a bad situation, which in my case is waiting for a delay at an airport or something, you want to be the person others don’t mind being trapped with.
I like to make up games when I’m bored. One of my favorites is The Best Friend Game, which I made up at a baseball game because I was bored out of my goddamn mind, mostly because I was at a baseball game.
TBFG works by scanning a crowd and selecting a person who you will now be forced to be BEST friends with for the next year. You’ll be at their life events, they’ll be at yours, you’ll see them every couple of weeks. You may be a people watcher, but this game is about people scrutinizing. Every little habit, everything they’re wearing, this is all the info you have to try and base a yearlong friendship on.
Where this gets fun is your friends saying, “Ugh, no I could never be friends with someone who wears yellow shoes.” You find out your friends are goddamn weirdos who really have no business just existing in the world with everyone else.
That’s my life advice: Whenever you’re bored, make up a game. And if you’re bored while playing a game, make up your own game within the game.
WITH THE EXCEPTION OF that bullshit where someone is like, “Make cleaning the bath tub into a game! Time yourself, then see if you can beat your best time.” That is NOT a game. Working hard and then seeing if you can work harder is work, dummy.
Volume 8
A funny thing about this zombie series is that it works kind of like others, but kind of backwards: Mostly, the characters go from fun activity to fun activity, and the zombies eventually show up in order to push the characters onto the next thing. I think in most series, the zombies kind of work to push characters out of comfortable, reasonable survival situations and into danger instead of pushing them onto the next item on their itinerary.
The way it’s the same, though, is that the zombies fade into the background as the series goes, really only popping up here and there as the plot requires. If you go through the early parts of The Walking Dead, the zombies are a significant threat, but as you go later, they’re really no big deal most of the time. Same here, except less emphasis on “The walking dead is us guys!” or however that was expressed.
Volume 9
I learned a thing!
Apparently, people from Osaka have a reputation:
“In Japanese media, if there’s a character from the Kansai region (Osaka especially), chances are they’re the most crass character present. In stark contrast to the rest of Japan, Japanese Politeness (or even just basic concepts like decorum and “good manners”) doesn’t exist for these guys. The people themselves are portrayed as lacking any semblance of sophisticated culture, being idiotic, loud and passionate, alcoholic, gluttonous, materialistic, prone-to-violence, incredibly cheap (yet somehow always broke), and speaking with a characteristic Kansai accent instantly recognizable to native speakers of Japanese.”
Now, in Zom 100, this seems softer, that Osakans are more passionate and boisterous, not so much crass or whatever, although I guess that’s a little hard to tell when we’re talking about Osakan zombies (where’s the decorum in flesh-eating?).
It IS pretty hilarious that in this series, zombies kind of reflect their former more alive selves in some ways, which is pretty fun, and I guess if I was a zombie I’d spend most of my time not really wanting to party with other zombies, so on one hand, you’d be safe as far as me joining a big horde, but on the other, I’d be that one zombie that’s always hiding out in a room alone or whatever, which can be the most deadliest zombie of them all!
OF THEM ALL.
Volume 10
My understanding of geisha stuff is not strong, and my hesitance to google it is, so I guess this is an area of Japanese culture that will remain somewhat mysterious for me, which is probably just fine.
Volume 11
One of my eccentric millionaire ideas (I have many) is to create a walking pilgrimage in America like this. I love this shit, like when you have to walk towards a rock with a hole in it, eyes closed, and see if you can put your walking staff through the hole without looking, or legends about what happens if you do or don’t see your face in a reflection pool.
Some of the features of my trail:
-A heavy stone to attempt to lift as a test of strength.
-A wishing well that only accepts 20-dollar bills.
-A part that requires crossing a somewhat challenging creek, a rite of passage in rural America.
-Probably a danger zone where you try to navigate a roundabout on foot (I don’t have strong feelings about roundabouts, but I feel like Americans…let’s say they’re not at their best in roundabouts).
-A lot of pizza places along the way.
Volume 12
Well, the cover got horny. Which is not unusual in the manga department, but I take umbrage with the cover being MUCH hornier than the contents.
Because if the contents aren’t going to be this graphic, then why are you making me hold a book with this facing everyone but me, causing people to be like, “Typical manga-reading pervo”?
Which is fine, I have no issue with that label, but if I’m going to get stuck with it, give me the pervo goods! Don’t force me to wear the label without even giving me the joy of perversion!
Fist of the North Star
Volume 3
If I had to be The Fist of [something], what would I be…?
The Fist of The Sometimes Harsh Book Reviewer?
His blows are not mighty and harm very few, but those who feel his wrath are forever haunted.
Volume 4
I feel like me and my brothers do not fistfight anywhere near as often as is depicted in this series. We also weren’t competing to be the sole practitioner of a martial art, but still. I wonder how many times in history two brothers have engaged in hand-to-hand combat to the death? I know they say The Civil War was brother against brother, but that’s not literal, right?
Well:
-There was a pair of brothers who fought, and the one brother captured the other brother and took him prisoner. Seems like that probably worked out okay, probably much better than running at a Gatling gun.
-There was a pair of brothers who both gained the position of brigadier general on opposite sides. One was relieved of duty for drunkenness. That’s a rough Thanksgiving right there, you come home and your brother is not only as high a rank as you, but he fought on the winning side AND didn’t get fired for drinking.
-Oof, while we’re on that note: As cited in the book, “A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky”, brothers Anthony and William McBeath fought on opposite sides of the Civil War, Anthony for the Confederate Army, and William for the Union Army. At the end of the war, both brothers returned home the same evening, William in a “resplendent uniform of a Major in the Federal Army”, and several hours later, Anthony in “rags with a ‘taterhill’ hat.”
It looks like the closest this came was two brothers, on opposite sides, fighting within yards of each other and not realizing it until the end of the battle.
It seems they took a lot more prisoners in those days. Maybe that was the “civil” part of The Civil War, they would take prisoners and not torture them and shit, perhaps because they were often related? Perhaps also because what would that do to help? It’s not like some dude with a single shot rifle fighting in central Kentucky has any fucking idea what the Union is planning for their next big strategic move.
Volume 5
Volume 6
I feel not enough emphasis is put on the fact that Ken is fistfighting a horse. I’ve had a lot of terrible ideas in my time, and trying to punch a horse is one of them thanks to Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs in which the hypothetical is asked:
Let us assume a fully grown, completely healthy Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while he head is held in place with thick rope. He is conscious and standing upright, but he is completely immobile. And let us assume that for some reason every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in less than twenty minutes. You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots. Would you attempt to do this?
I just looked up how many people this would be, and it’s estimated to be one million.
So I guess I’d try. Mostly because if I didn’t, I’d always wonder, right? And I feel I owe it to the prisoners to at least give it a shot. I mean, god forbid I ever meet one of them, and I’m like, “Bro, you should’ve seen this horse. My man was HUGE.”
It’s why the question is “Would you attempt to do this?” as opposed to “Would you do it?” Because the idea isn’t about your likelihood of success, it’s about whether you’d rather live with the memory of trying or not trying.
I wouldn’t enjoy attempting to kick a horse to death, and I don’t think I could possibly succeed.
But if Ken would try punching a horse just to fight his brother, I suppose I should go ahead and give it a whirl.
Attack On Titan
Volume 28
I finally got to read this, but I had to put the physical copy on hold because the digital was taking SO LONG to arrive from my library.
That’s right, wood pulp and ink touched my hands. I read like a peasant. This is a personal attack on the titan that is my dignity.
Volume 29
Somewhere around here, this series probably gets a little too complicated for its own good.
On the other hand, gotta respect a series that tries to keep the story developing instead of the rinse/repeat cycle you see with some titles.
There’s a part of me that thinks it would be hilarious to publish a manga title, call it volume 29, and ONLY publish that volume. Set up a fake website and some summaries of other sections, but only put out 29, have the story be absolutely impenetrable, and just sort of see what happens.
This is why you should buy my books: If I become rich, I’ll do a lot of stunt publishing that’ll make the world a much more interesting place.
Volume 30
The series is highly-rated at this point, and that’s a comic book effect you see on Goodreads:
It’s not because volume 30 is necessarily better than volume 10, but what happens on Goodreads is that as a series goes on, only people who like what’s happening tend to stick with it this long. You’ll get a ton of people who kinda like it, maybe, sorta, for the first 10 or so volumes, but when you’ve got a 34-volume series, even completionists will drop off somewhere before they hit the 30’s.
The result is that when you hit the last quarter of a long series, you’re almost guaranteed to have pretty high ratings because you’ve weeded out anyone who isn’t going to like it long ago.
It’s not a problem with goodreads, per se, but a quirk: the later volumes of a long series will almost always have a much better rating than the earlier ones.
Which is why I’m going to break up a future novel into 34 very short, separate chapters. That way, I can finally get some decent ratings around here.
Volume 31
Yeah, once we knew what was up with the massive number of gigantic titans, would we have been satisfied if they never came to life and started trampling shit? Chekov’s Hidden Army of Naked Muscle/Skin Men tells us No.
Volume 32
This is the first series that has sorely tempted me to keep charts of what’s happening without completely turning me off reading the whole thing, and for that alone, it earns some stars.
Volume 33
It’s so strange to review the penultimate volume of a long series like this because it’s like, “Who cares?”
Nobody is going to stop at volume 33, right? Except maybe for some maniac who, I don’t know, decides to read a bunch of series right up to the end, then save the final volumes for later in life? Which is not a terrible idea, TBH, you could probably get away with that. Maybe it’s wise to save something for later, you know? Something that gives you a reason to get up and be like, “Well, I haven’t read the last Attack on Titan yet, so I don’t know how it ends, so I guess I might as well keep going.”
The risk there is that you’ll die in some sudden unexpected way, and you’ll NEVER finish it. Although maybe thinking about how you never finished a manga series on your deathbed means you must’ve lived a life of non-major regrets, so, you know, could be a plus.
Volume 34
Alright, let’s do an overall series review with no real spoilers here.
This is a really good series that is imperfect in a lot of ways.
I think it becomes a little too complicated, too many factions with too many varying goals, and because there’s a lot of different people lying to other people, it’s a bit hard to keep track of what’s happening when.
These issues are exacerbated by a few things:
1. There are A LOT of characters to keep track of.
2. The characters could be more distinct. I think some design choices would help Eren look less like Levi, for example, make Mikasa look more different from some characters, make Reiner and Floch look more different. Some really different hair, some more obvious nods to differentiation, some clothing choices, a scar, facial hair, all of these things would help. As an example, I never had trouble telling who Zeke was, and he has a beard and glasses. That’s enough!
3. The flashbacks aren’t always easy to identify as flashbacks, and when we flash back, it’s not always easy to tell exactly where we are in the timeline. There were some charts/maps in the series early on that explained how the walled cities worked and how there were “bumps” on the outside wall that acted as their own sort of cities, and the manga sort of stepped out of the story and explained this pretty nicely. I think there was probably a way to introduce flashbacks similarly with a timeline or other device that’d make it easier to tell where we were and to know immediately that we hadn’t just changed scenes, we were in a totally different time.
4. Because the story has a lot of lies built on lies, it becomes a little hard to know when it’s okay to completely dismiss plotline A (because it was just a character’s theory, a speculation, or involved something hidden from other characters), and when it’s time to move on to plotline B.
All that said, some things that I do like:
1. I like that the reader is discovering the truth of this world alongside the characters. Readers don’t really know more than the characters at most points, which is a pretty big feat in a book with this much going on. It’s not 100% successful 100% of the time, but it’s mostly successful most of the time, and I really prefer this method of storytelling to the version of this that could’ve been where the reader knows a lot more than the characters, or the reader is always two steps ahead of the characters.
2. I like that the story does evolve and get more complex as it goes. I can see some people reading this and yearning for the simpler conflict of humans v titans from the earlier volumes, but I think when something goes on this long, it doesn’t HAVE to change, but change is earned and welcome.
3. I like that the characters change to an extent, and that the series is not afraid to kill characters or really change how they operate. I think this keeps things a lot livelier. When a series has stakes, but the stakes are kind of a secret handshake between the reader and the author that say, “Don’t worry, nobody you like is in trouble, and you will continue liking them throughout the series,” it kills a lot of the excitement and drama.
4. The series really doesn’t have much bloat. Something is always happening, most of the things that need to be paid off are, and I think we reach a conclusion that wraps up what needs to be wrapped up.
I understand there are lots of people who are not happy with the ending of this series, but I think it works, and I’m pretty satisfied.
I don’t usually enjoy an ending like this that’s a bit abstract and where the plan didn’t make a ton of sense because there are a lot of “What if this happened, what if this didn’t go as planned?” sorts of questions we’re left with. However, in this case, it works for me.
The ending and final plan have an infinite number of unknowns, and it couldn’t be masterminded perfectly, but I think what we’re seeing is a character who makes a choice and sees no option other than to play that choice out. It’s a horrible set of options, none of which have bloodless results, none of which can guarantee success, so I think our “villain” goes with the choice that he feels has the highest probability of success.
It’s super important that success for this character is defined in a pretty concrete way: a specific group of people living long, happy lives.
I think where this is mostly open to interpretation is in deciding A) Whether the cost is justifiable, and B) whether the plan succeeded.
I think most of us would say the cost isn’t justifiable, and that’s okay, I think it’s reasonable to view things that way, I don’t think the book precludes that line of thinking.
I think lots of readers would probably say that massive bloodshed would have been the result regardless of the plot’s direction, so perhaps this is something that worked out for the best.
And I think the series earns its ambiguity, it’s moral question the reader is left with.
I also feel that the success in terms of “long happy lives” is very debatable, and that’s also okay. I think “long, happy lives” is a very relative proposition within the world of this story, and there’s a lot to be said for, “Nobody is going to see their mother eaten alive by a giant naked man” being a form of “happiness.”
Overall, a really great series, an achievement, to be sure, and while the series has some rougher artwork earlier on and doesn’t have the smoothest story, it’s certainly well worth the trip, in my opinion.
For Potential Readers:
I would do things a little differently if I were reading this again, and I do have some advice for first-timers:
-I’d keep track of characters and major plot points, probably in a journal or online document. Writing these things out helps me clarify for myself, so I’d probably do that. If I were in your shoes, I’d probably be saying, “Why would I read a series that I have to keep track of that way?” and I’d tell myself, Listen, dumdum, you don’t NEED to do it, you’ll mostly get it and read a couple summaries along the way, but I think your experience will be more enjoyable if you do keep some track of everything going on.
-I’d try and read this series completely within a couple weeks, and I’d put other reading and especially comics aside while I did so. This isn’t an easy one to dip in and out of, you’ll forget SO MUCH, so if I did this again, I’d try and do it in a shorter period with no other reading happening at the same time.
-I’d REALLY avoid spoilers online, I think a lot of the fun of this is some of the discovery along the way, and it’s a series where things that don’t seem like spoilers may chip away at the story and lessen the experience a bit.
-I’d turn off the part of my brain that tries to predict what’s coming next and just enjoy the ride. This isn’t a problem for me, I’m not much of a predictor with stuff like this, but I know that’s how some people engage with stories, and I’d really encourage you to relax that side and just go with the flow a bit more. The characters WILL puzzle things out for you at a very good pace, and the energy you spend trying to figure it all out is better spent enjoying the ride, know what I mean?