YMMV / Clawing at Glass

• Awesome Moments:
  • The more we learn about Talvor, the more we realize what a monster he was. He was a sadistic, genocidal cult leader who turned House Noon into his charnel house and attempted to implement a mass slaughter of House Dusk. So in retrospect, Avis opening his throat in chapter 1 is the best thing he ever did.
  • Ahandi the Sprucequeen manages to go toe to toe with Trick-Jack itself and hold her own. Even if it backfires horribly, she even manages to beat the smug abomination, even if it's at the cost of her existence.
  • Jondi faces Kryce, armed with the power of the Conflagration, drawing on all his power to halt Kryce and stop the insane day-vamp.
  • Zada pulls off the ultimate gambit: She's been conning the Red King and White Queen all along to revive the Watcher within Jondi and help see them stopped. And the Watcher is flaming mad about what the Red King and White Queen would do to his playground and his little ants.
  • Avis ascends to the position of Batlord, gaining the wings of the office and facing off with Kryce who achieves one of these himself by subsuming the will of the Red King. In the battle with Avis and Raphandas, Avis is finally able to reach his broken brother and grant him the peace he deserves by ending him and the Red King.
  • Jondi and the Watcher within him face off with the White Queen, luring her to earth to cut her in half and end her for good as well.
• Complete Monster: Talvor, the sadistic Batlord of House Noon, began his reign by savagely torturing the day-vamps of the House into genocidal fanatics, with some being irreparably broken by his abuse. Talvor purged all those he deemed "weak" from House Noon, from the infirm to the children, to pile their corpses underneath the House. Launching his genocidal Red Dawn to butcher countless members of House Dusk, civilians and children included, Talvor extended his crusade to attempt to turn Dusk into a charnel house. Talvor planned to harness the flames of a power known as the Conflagration with full intent to unleash it and wipe out all the rest of Inoptica to build an empire out of the ashes and blood of the innocents he slaughtered.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • Trick-Jack is a shapeshifting, monstrous abomination that murders as easily as breathing, but it's hard not to enjoy how memorably charismatic it can be.
  • Zada's true self is memorably disturbingly empty and unable to feel much of anything in regards to emotions. Despite this, she's clever, charismatic and one of the best parts of the story.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • Kryce isn't winning any awards for personality, being a genocidal torturer and warmonger, but when Trick-Jack uses Talvor's form to manipulate him, Kryce is like a child before his elder brother and we see how horrifically Talvor has tortured and conditioned him into being what he is.
  • Wydel gets a retrospective one. The sweet, gentle little girl we know? We're going to see her shattered, and it's a safe bet she loses her beloved sister Ahandi, lending more context to the vicious Sprucequeen we knew in Mirrorworld.
  • Even Zada isn't devoid of layers of sympathy. For all her ruthless manipulations and murders, Zada can't feel emotions, as much as it seems she'd like to, placing her totally aloof from even those who care about her.
  • Even Trick-Jack gets this. Taking on Ahandi's memories and personality, including her love for Wydel, it's also revealed Trick-Jack is little more than a tool for its parents, with no will save that they programmed into it.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Any scene with Zada early on, with the reveal the sweet, caring wing-sage never existed and is a front for a devious, tormented sociopath.
  • Knowing little Wydel becomes the vicious Sprucequeen later can lend a nasty pallor over what comes next.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Wydel and Ahandi's relationship is truly adorable, with Ahandi showing nothing but love and care to her sister.
  • Jondi, for all his bitter misanthropy, reveals his true care and respect towards Zada in his thoughts, showing her perky optimism hasn't gone unappreciated.
  • As nasty as he can be, Avis shows he's capable of humanity by rescuing two night-claw children of Dusk from one of Talvor's brainwashed soldiers, the first truly good deed Avis does.
  • Wydel reaches out to Zada out of sympathy for her plight, which is very impressive given the animosity between the houses. The two even end up allying to find and rescue Jondi.
  • Avis, of all people, refuses to harm Wydel, revealing a trend with him; no matter how far he's fallen, he will not hurt children.
  • Despite not even knowing them and traumatized by Zada's betrayal, Jondi dedicates himself to saving Wydel and Avis because they're living beings.
  • Avis is revealed to have saved dozens of night-claw children, hiding them away to keep them safe from Talvor and his disciples. In this case, Avis is absolutely adorable for once, and a loving big brother to them who have adopted him as a precious family member.
  • Raphandas, the Pitchwraith with all reasons to despise Avis, devotes himself to saving the new Batlord to allow for peace between Noon and Dusk.
• Love to Hate:
  • Trick-Jack is a memorable monster. A sadistic, shapeshifting thing that plunges Inoptica into chaos, manipulates the deaths of hundreds, with thousands more planned in the name of the Red King and White Queen. It also has immense presence and a memorable, vile personality to boot.
  • Talvor the Batlord is a vicious, brutal Nazi of a day-vamp who despite dying in his first appearance has his presence hang over the story. Talvor is violent, savage, memorably monstrous, especially when compared with the flawed, if kindhearted Volte of Mirrorworld and one of the single most nightmarish figures of the Inopticus.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Avis is a day-vamp defined by his desire to end Batlord Talvor's "Red Dawn" genocide campaign and return House Noon to its former peaceful ways, no matter what ruthless means are required. Allying with the nightmarish forces of the Red King and Trick-Jack, Avis used them to assist him in subverting Talvor at every possible point, saving dozens of orphaned war children and taking them under his wing while slaughtering his more wicked day-vamp brothers at every possible opportunity. Kicking the story off by murdering Talvor and framing it as a casualty of the battlefield, Avis manipulates the unstable Kryce into continuing Talvor's villainy so as to push him into handing control of the powerful Conflagration over to Avis under the belief it will assist the Red Dawn, when truthfully Avis plans to use the Conflagration to turn on Kryce and end the war. Though Left for Dead by the White Queen's champion Zada, Avis survives and allies with enemies of House Noon to manipulate his way into gaining title of Batlord, using the newfound power to overcome Kryce and the Red King once and for all. Avis comes out of the story completely on top, leading House Noon into peace talks and looking forward to a bright future for all of Inoptica now that the wars have ended—in major part due to his machinations.
  • Auditor Zada of House Midnight is a seemingly perky and friendly wing-sage who attends the depressive surgeon Jondi. Secretly a sociopath working for the White Queen, Zada arranges brood attacks to force Jondi to rise to his potential, later betraying and all but destroying House Midnight while assisting the Queen and the Red King in bringing war to Inoptica. Having betrayed even them by bargaining with the god of Inoptica, the Watcher, Zada makes Jondi the Watcher's host to achieve the end of the Queen and King, ending in exile upon earth while vowing that no matter what happens, she will never end in her quest to uncover feeling.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Zada wiping out so much of House Midnight shows there's no going back for her.
  • Talvor is revealed to have crossed it long ago. If it wasn't when he mutilated his own day-vamps to make them his broken puppets, it was when he slaughtered Noon's own 'weak' population, children included...and his plans to exterminate most of all life within Inoptica.
• Nightmare Fuel: As in the original, there's a lot of horror to be had here.
  • The Brood are as monstrous as ever, slaughtering what's in their path and being described in horrific terms.
  • Remember when House Noon were the good guys? Not so here, where they're savage, sadistic, violent fanatics who practice torture and genocide upon House Dusk for simply existing. Led by the horrific, savage Talvor, Noon's ambitions are described as 'holocaust dreams' and he controls his followers through conditioning and abuse akin to an evil cult leader.
  • The shape shifting Trick-Jack is a disturbing, savage creature out to 'purge' countless beings in its service to its mysterious monarchs and is frequently quite understandable but disturbingly off somewhere.
  • The slaughter of House Midnight. Zada murders Farseer Hypraith, allowing Trick-Jack to gorily slaughter everything in his path as they leave the House burning behind them.
  • The Fall of Inoptica with the absolute nightmare Trick-Jack means to spread, massive outgrowths pouring over Inoptica and his plan to start a genocide on other Houses through Kryce.
  • The reveal that Talvor's A Nazi by Any Other Name tendencies did not end with other Houses. He purged the 'weak' from House Noon very brutally, including his House's children, filling entire charnel pits with the dead.
  • The horrific state of Avis after Talvor was done with him. His torso is a horrific patchwork of scar tissue so that even his bones have been adjusted, his chest just a knot of horrific scars. And it's pretty clear Talvor gave this treatment to all the day-vamps under his control.
  • The White Queen herself. A clever, wicked abomination who is a Kaiju sized serpent with a disturbingly human face, whose 'diamond light' can reduce all it falls upon to her broken puppets. And she sees whoever's looking at her, able to deconstruct them with a brutal Breaking Speech or two...
  • The Red King is a great phoenix of fire and hatred. Unlike the White Queen, he's a being of violent and savage destruction who can annihilate entire worlds with those he's caught trapped in his wings to burn eternally in endless agony.
• Paranoia Fuel: Trick-Jack is a shapeshifter who can look like anyone and is very good at assuming their mannerisms and style of speaking. Anyone could be Trick-Jack looking to sow discord...
• Tearjerker:
  • Wydel's entire existence. Seeing her as sweet, shy, caring and gentle as a naive little seed-fang, knowing it's a matter of time until she becomes the monstrous Sprucequeen seen in Mirrorworld.
  • Zada's PTSD over the Brood attack and the deaths of her comrades, resulting in her breakdown at a meeting. Seeing the happy-go-lucky, cheery wing-save succumb to such sadness and how badly the ordeal has affected her is truly gut-wrenching.
  • The reveal of Zada's true identity: she's an agent of Trick Jack as well, playing everyone around her. None of her old affability is fake, but the kind, devoted Zada we knew never truly existed, and this is as devastating to Jondi as the reader.
  • The reveal of Ahandi in that she began draining her rivals of energy, and didn't stop there, unnecessarily murdering hundreds of seed-fangs before she became Sprucequeen.
  • For all Ahandi's faults, it's easy to be horrified and sad when she defeats Trick-Jack but absorbs his blood, merging their personalities and changing her into something else entirely.
  • The reveal that House Noon's treatment under Talvor amounted to savage torture and conditioning. Every day-vamp, no matter how ferocious or savage, is just a pawn who was turned into a monster by horrible brutality.
  • Milivia gives her life in a hope for a better future and for her soldiers, passing away with Avis and Raphandas by her side.
  • Wydel is unable to let Ahandi go, even if Ahandi-Jack is just a facade with her sister's appearance and memories. Trying to absorb poison from her just leads to Ahandi gone forever and Wydel's body mutating horribly.
  • Even Ahandi's survival brings little catharsis. Her House is all but gone, Dawn's seed-fangs mutated into abominations, including Wydel. Ahandi can only stop by to say a final, sad farewell and a promise she'll wait for her sister.