Despite these feelings, it seems to me that the spirit of communism never left Pyramiden — even after its people did.
The spirit of communism?? THE SPIRIT?!!! SAY THE "SPECTER OF COMMUNISM" ALMA!!
Today I plunged
Today, I plunged
THE SCRIBE: Dost thou verily let gossip name thee? Whom is the source of such repulsive rot, unbefit of the noble folk that here live?
MAN: Those that doth gaze up me and thee, like we dost gaze up to the Crimson Sun aloft. But let us depart from such games of chicanery: none has a name for me yond my visage, and my visage doth name me suitably indeed.
I think this is a more obvious example of a problem that shows up every now and then throughout the entry. The old language is fairly excessive, not to the point of being illegible but distracting from the content.
[Looking to the Spider] By thine hands dost we know hope, and mine dost we know gloom.
"mind dost we know gloom"?
There's the notes section that appears near the end of certain sections. While I understand the point of them is to exposit the meaning of the play above- and in a clever way- I am still… lost. It's a struggle to draw connections between what the play is saying literally, what the notes are saying the play means, what you as the author means, and what I can understand, and so on and on and on. I can best describe it as an overload. I leave each section not necessarily confused but moreso just not really interested.
That's not to say it isn't interesting, but there's so much going on, so much lore, so many characters, anomalies, phenomena, terms, historical facts, that it feels like I'm supposed to be taking notes on this or something. Even if I did, would that improve the experience? No.
CHARLATAN: Forsooth, believest thou that those same folk will indeed welcome thy voice when it is not of godly distance, but of true presence? Dost thou hope — in foolish feverishness, no doubt — that thy visage will friendlier prove when gazed upon with eyes not from the mind?
It just continues. I have no idea what this means. This isn't a "oh, it's more abstract and im so confused because of how esoteric it is", this simply doesn't mean anything. The language is fancy and clearly has effort put in, but how much effort are you expecting of the reader to read lines like this again and again and again? This isn't testing my reading comprehension, it's testing my patience.
I don't think I need to go on. I'll try to finish this sometime later but I don't think I will. It's too much. It's a matter of keeping the reader's attention and it tries to do that, but in the end it's just sensory overload. There's a trail of info here, a trail there, a thread, a string, and after it all I'm simply just not interested in what's going on. I don't think anyone has actually finished this- or rather, has actually read it in its entirety.
If the counterargument to that is that it doesn't matter, then that suggests that neither does any offset between the initial page and the ending.
I don't care for the inserts, if they're references to members of the LA community then I simply don't get the references beyond your own self-insert who is never really described and I can only assume they are yours because they are called "the hare".