I'm kind of the opposite with this, the fact that the story references a lot of lore without fully explaining it makes it more engaging for me, as it allows the reader to try and guess what it all means. my current theory is that each of the magic types is correlated to one of the four basic elements and their general philosophies. Grace would be water type spells, it's described to be gentle and it seems that it helps plants to grow; Fury would be fire, it seems it's an aggressive kind of magic, Gravity seems to be earth based and my understanding is that it's used for weight manipulation and plowing fields, Memory would be air based, the only hint being the mention of the elephants atuned to this magic being stargazers. Also they are all color coded, grace being blue and fury being red makes the correlation to water and fire pretty easy, gravity being yellow and memory being grey are a bit more confusing, and gravity as a word could easily correlate to air instead, but i figured the abstractness of memory would fit air much better than earth.
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Your theory generally seems to make sense so far. I might have to re-read with that in mind and see if things start clicking into place for me better.
Our difference in opinion is why I thought an optional lore section might be nice. You could choose to have the worldbuilding naturally introducted throughout the story, or to have more elements spelled out from the start. For me it's less about preserving the mystery and more about feeling like an outsider. The reason for (parts of) my confusion doesn't feel like the inherent mystery of the narrative, it feels like missing context that I'd have if I were a native of their world. It'd be like me traveling to another country without doing any research on its history or culture, then being shocked that I'm confused upon arrival. I just wish I could do more research before I "travel" to this world next so I don't feel so uncultured.
I still concede that I may just be dense lol. In many fantasy stories that I've read, the point-of-view characters are either young, new to the area/world, or both, so characters have an in-universe excuse to infodump massive amounts of information. Because Thatcher is already well-established in his world and has lived several decades, his inner monologue is not very illuminating; many of the concepts that may be new to the reader are commonplace things that aren't even worth a second thought to Thatcher anymore. If there were lengthy periods of exposition within his own thoughts, it would feel untrue to his character and would obviously be there just for the audience's benefit. Anamnesis is employing a more mature method of storytelling that I'm not really used to. Not a writing flaw, just something I need to either learn to adjust to, or simply accept that things will go over my head as I'm reading and power through until it makes sense again.
I do understand what you meant. I was just voicing out my own preferences on the matter. I find that characters with well stablished pasts i'm not immediately privy to are leagues more fascinating than your usual blank slate protagonist, which is generally a clutch for storytelling to excuse info dumps. This is done so many times, and those characters often turn out way too ignorant or naive, thus i revel when a narritive actually challenges my own intellect as a reader. I do think that i'm of a minority in this regard though, as i see a lot more people who dig in the self insert protag cause it helps them relate to the story. It's just that doesn't work well with me, these self inserts feel more like non-characters as they have little to no remarkable traits. At the end of the day it's all a matter of preference.
also i just felt like trying to theorize about the magic system out here, you seemed interested in the topic at the very least.