Thank you for the feedback! I talked with my codirector and admittedly I think our goal going in was less "all quiet on the western front" and more "he looks so hot in fur and armor like that." Like yeah fair, I was out here imagining Ulfor doing some wall bounce michael sword combo musuo game shit. I don't think there's such a thing as a good war, but I'm also not immune to how cool a guy with a big sword can be. I wanted it to less about the Horrors of War (and the war itself, I find traditional war stories really boring unless there's like lasers or monsters or whatever) and just more about the species disenfranchised by the folklore around them, and less about war and exploring the human cost around that (beyond the personal cost) because I knew I didn't have the interest or the time required to really pursue anything beyond that. If the aura farming failed to live up to the hype, then so be it, I'm glad you enjoyed the parts that you did either way!
Viewing post in To The Noblest End jam comments
Yeah, to clarify, the kind of analysis I gave in the comment is really dependent on the intended tone of the piece. When I'm killing time on a plane playing Advance Wars I'm not exactly screaming "WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE POOR WIDOWS OF ORANGE STAR" lol. Furthermore, upon further reflection, I don't think this is all that dissimilar to the stuff I was writing back in college, so I'm not exactly immune either.
I interpreted the tone as going for more ethical depth, but, somewhat ironically given your preferences, it read much closer to a "traditional" war story, just without the action scenes. That all said, I am literally the only person who seems to have any issue here, so while I stand by my analysis since that's an honest assessment of how I processed the text, I can also accept that I'm the weird one.
Big wolf man make sword go brrr. Cheers.