Zeno Anecdote Thoughts
Enjoyed the anecdote. As a self-contained story, it works pretty well - I liked getting more characterization for Lilya, and Hassan is a well-sketched character. There's too much "As you know George" dialogue and Aleksei is a bit over the top, but it works.
Nitpicks -
I was frustrated that it continues the trend of side stories not really engaging with the overall world-building. Zeno seems to be engaged in a military nation-building exercise modeled on something like the U.S./NATO engagement in Afghanistan (albeit a few decades earlier), but we're in the post-Storm world (and they know about Storms) and the next Storm is just going to obliterate everything they do, so why are they spending manpower on this?
They also don't tell us who Zeno are fighting. We never get any information on who the enemy are - they're hill people, they really hate Zeno (possibly due to things Zeno did during their prior mercenary work), they don't have arcanum weapons of their own but do use captured Zeno weaponry, and they use poisoned melee weapons. It doesn't sound like Manus, but if they're not Manus, why is Zeno spending their soldiers' lives here when the next Storm is going to wipe all of these people away anyways?
We get some bromides about the importance of loyalty and sacrifice for soldiers, but nothing about the cause for which these soldiers are fighting and dying. What is Zeno trying to accomplish? Who opposes them? We don't even get a surface level explanation for this war. Aleksei is outraged that the mission priority was to retrieve documents over wounded comrades (fair enough), but he doesn't seem to have any qualms about the cause for which his comrades died. Except neither he nor anyone else mentions what that was.
Posted Sep 6, 2024, 12:19 AM UTC