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troperville

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tools

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toys

• Angst? What Angst?: People tend to under react to a lot of things
• Anvilicious: According to the prologue, the nuclear wars could ultimately be traced back to the abuse of eminent domain laws...which, according to the author, are inherently evil anyway.
• Author's Saving Throw: There's a revised version that drops the discussion of eminent domain and the "piercing screams for help" line, among others. Sadly, only the prologue appears to have gotten any attention.
• Critical Research Failure
• Designated Hero: Rah, who does absolutely nothing to try to help Zyn when he goes off on his downward spiral. Even after we're told that Zyn is forcing Muggles into submission to obey him and attacking other people, Rah doesn't do a freaking thing!
• Designated Villain: The book makes every effort to make readers believe that Zyn is a horrible person, even calling him and his followers "terrorists" at one point. The only things we actually see him do on screen is act ridiculously nasty towards his followers and plan to move to an island.
• Idiot Plot
• Marty Stu: Rah.
• Narm: There's plenty to go around.
• Padding: Lots of it, but two examples are especially bad standouts:
  1. A chapter dedicated to ripping off the Fawlty Towers episode "Communication Problems".
  2. A five-page poem that doesn't advance the plot, or even scan properly, and is bad enough to make a Vogon cringe.
• Painful Rhyme: A five-page poem is built on these.
• Shocking Swerve: The whole work, relative to the Cold War paranoia of the intro.
• Strangled by the Red String: Catherine and Walter
• Strawman Has a Point: Zyn
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The "plot" is disjointed and incoherent because of its tendency to skip several years between chapters, missing countless storytelling opportunities along the way.
• Unfortunate Implications:
  • The Muggles, hairless dwarf humans who look like babies their whole lives, have evolved/mutated from "conscientious objectors, sick and diseased, physically challenged, elderly, blind, deaf, savants, midgets, earning disabled, the Have Nots" along with "ethnically impure" people, who were left behind on the continent of Aura during the nuclear war, which could be taken as a rather offensive statement about the genetic makeup of such groups. The phrase "ethnically impure" conjures up pretty unfortunate implications on its own.
  • Zyn, the "bad" brother, grows up to have reddish hair and green eyes. Rah, the "good" brother, keeps his blond-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan appearance.