Unreliable Narrators

Every source of information you get about this story is unreliable. This includes the things I say, to a degree; I don’t lie about the contents of the story, but there are plenty of things I omit, particularly spoilers about future story events or the hidden significance of some of the elements in the story and characters. I’m not likely to point things like that out in the comments, because the story is written from Kyoko’s perspective and I tend to limit some kinds of information to things she knows.

So, I’m unreliable. The information within the story is even more so. Every character has their own biases and agendas. Everyone has blind spots. Many people are either actively misinformed, reaching wrong conclusions, or simply lying. Kyoko’s narration is not an exception, and that the story is purely conveyed in that narration impacts what shows up in numerous ways. One of the major things I hope to do with things like interludes, in-universe documents, and extended notes is provide other perspectives, other elements of the story, characters, and world.

This might leave you asking why I do it this way, since I’m spending so much effort covering a gap that’s present purely because of my stylistic choices. The simple answer to that is that I want to make a detailed study of Kyoko, her personality, thoughts, and choices. It is easier to do that from her perspective than from the outside, fundamentally. If you knew things she doesn’t, you wouldn’t have the same understanding of why she chooses what she does.

That said, though, there’s an important idea that this suggests in turn. This is something that will eventually start to be emphasized in the text itself, but if you’re interested enough to read notes like this I think it bears mention sooner. If you accept at face value that the things someone tells you are true, you will never be a player in their games, only a playing piece.

This is an important enough idea for this story that I’m actually going to reiterate it. If you accept at face value that you are being told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that the person telling you something is always going to be both honest and correct, you will never fully understand events in this story, and the people who play deceptive games behind the scenes will manipulate you as easily as they manipulate the protagonist, if not more so.

I’m going to use a few examples from the first book here to illustrate what I mean. I would like to stress this is only covering a few, and only in detail that has already been shown. This note is also not an exception to my policy of not revealing information I don’t feel should be called out yet.

Martin is the first and perhaps easiest example. That he was asking Maddie about plant growth isn’t something that could have been pointing that direction, and I’m not including it here. But there were plenty of other things. You might have noticed that when Audgrim talked about there being a possible leak he had some decent points. You might have thought about who had directly observed Kyoko doing her thing, and remembered that in chapter five, Martin was there watching. You might have recalled that he was the one who knew that Chris and Saori were friends. When it became apparent that Capinera was a similarly, completely false lead, you might remember that Martin was the one who gave them this lead, something Jack mentions in passing in chapter sixteen. He was the reason they were all there that night, when the mages were attacking Cerdinen’s home.

You might have thought about how this group of mages was human, and realized how they were demonstrably doing a lot of planning and setup for this. Arranging some of the details of their scheme happened weeks in advance. You might have thought about how they were doing pretty awful shit and clearly knew that they had to carefully control information flow in order to maintain secrecy, given that in the first chapter they were using obscure, highly-specialized procedures to wipe their signature from the scene. People like that don’t trust hirelings to take care of something important and highly sensitive. If they had a mole, it was one they knew was reliable and loyal.

You might have thought about how there were traces of multiple human mages, and that while someone getting off on violence is pretty routine, it’s considerably less common for someone with murderous intent to have the kind of calm, peaceful magic that showed up when Mike was abducted. You might have asked what kind of person uses that kind of magic, and remembered that there was a mage earlier whose presentation was specifically called out as being calm, unobtrusive, and nonthreatening.

All of this information was as available to you as it was to Kyoko. I do not expect most people realized in advance that Martin was a plant. But it was there for you, if you looked.

Audgrim’s behavior was similar. Why did he seem so bleak and tired when he acknowledged the debt he owed Kyoko now? When she kept emphasizing that debt, was it a great idea to be reminding him of it so much? When she was surprised that the dvergar hadn’t removed him from his position with likely-lethal prejudice, what did that suggest, and would he have known what it suggested? How would his building anxiety impact him, once he realized what happened?

Why did he try to strip defenders from the group at the end? Why did he never get too mixed up in the fighting? Why, when it was mentioned that everyone was battered at the end of the fight in chapter tweny-seven, did Audgrim not feature in the injury list after a pretty impressive bloodbath?

When Kyoko felt that this made sense and that she could have predicted Audgrim’s betrayal, she’s not just beating herself up and engaging in self-recrimination. She had the information she needed to see this coming and should have known to be wary. Inductive analysis of his position, his needs, and his abilities could have suggested that he would do something like this, particularly after he set Kyoko up to be attacked once.

I think a lot of people, though, will still be surprised, when he murders his erstwhile ally.

If you accept what you are told at face value rather than think for yourself about what it means, if you take it on faith that what you are being shown is all there is to see, you will never be a player, only a piece on the board.

Now, to be clear, I don’t mean to say that you need to be thinking in this way. The story can be enjoyed just fine without reading the interludes or notes, and without engaging in extensive critical thought. There will be a lot of details about what’s going that aren’t apparent, and some things may not make sense at first, but my intention is that it’s possible to read only superficially and enjoy the story. It’s only if you want to fully understand what’s going on that you will need to think critically about what you’re reading rather than take it at face value.