I am very sorry for how delayed chapter 50 is getting. I have worked out the first thousand or so words, and I know where it's supposed to go, but life has been getting in the way.
I am currently trying to get out applications to the nursing program, so that's eating into my attention span even when I'm not actively doing that and am doing other things. It's creating quite a bit of stress.
Anyway, in other news, I DID decide to pursue something different in regards to the story. I have been having a lot of difficulty fleshing out the history and political details of the human society around the fairy queen's forest. However, due to the wonderful support from my subscribers, I had the money to commission someone over on fiverr to help me in that area. So, please thank xshedevilx who I am commissioning this work from, and also thank all of the subscribers both current and former who I will now list here. (Also, there are a few I have neglected to mention when they subscribed. I will note that next to their names with a "new" tag.)
- Nicholas Rowland (new)
- F_W (new)
- Fox (new)
- Asekhan
- Alexander J Martin
- Remigius
- Bemaan
- Vorquel
- P:rehistoricDuck
- Lord Fufundra
- mareus
- Duvet
- Akreli
- Rebecca L Macy
- Roy
- meowingLexi
And the former subscribers, who each unsubscribed for their own reasons, mostly due to their own financial difficulties. I do not think any less of a single one of you. In fact, I appreciate that while you are facing your own tight budgets you still gave what you could because you appreciate my work. And because you gave all you could until you couldn't afford it anymore, you are going to all get your own special acknowledgements as well. So, please also thank...
- ?
- Lantisl
- NohVoha
- Anthel
- ExorcistJoker
- Pedro h simonetti
(Can I also mention how interesting it is that meowingLexi and Roy are the 1st and 2nd subscribers, and are also 2 out of the 3 most frequent commenters? The 3rd frequent commenter frequently changes though. There was also NohVoha, Lantisl, and Asekhan who each commented frequently for a while. NohVoha and Lantisl's reason for stopping is clear since they each had to unsubscribe, but Asekhan stuck around but faded into the background. (he primarily posted theory comments, maybe he didn't like his theory comments winding up featured since he probably felt they were possible spoilers? If that's the case, he could have just told me. I like everyone's comments. I like seeing that people are enjoying my work.)
EDIT: I previously had a comment here about some negative reviews. After the wonderful talk I have had with all of you down in the comments section, I have realized that I was just being a little too sensitive. It seems the one point in the entire series there was any kind of significant drop-off in readership is when people realized just how much this series deserved that "gore" content warning tag I put up rather than any of those things the haters comment about, which means they are just a few in number bunch of haters and the haters are gonna hate.
Thank you everyone for your support, I will continue to produce the content you all love.
I think this is a good series
Why i cant really explain it's just fun to read
Let me check these negative reviews to see if I can agree with them or not
Welp they all say the same, slow passing and info dump, and all I can say is that if you read all chapters you won't say that is slow as for the info dump I don't know how I feel about that because it didn't feel that way to me, if you wanted to improve to get readers like these I think that it won't be the same story but that's my personal opinion because I always felt that the passing was just right
Also there was a comment on how dark this was but maybe I'm bad in the head because I think that it could be a lot and I mean a LOT darker
In my personal opinion, you did a pretty good job writing so far, but as an aspiring law student, I have some points I want to point out about the previous arc.
In my personal opinion, the fairest court is not a jury, but a panel of judges that cannot involve themselves in politics. When it comes to matters that can directly affect countries, a civilian just doesn't make a good verdict. You can use a jury, but they can never take a case that may sentence someone to death, the burden of sentencing someone to their deaths must never fall on a citizens shoulders. Guilt may happen if it were so and that would never result in a fair result.
As for the accuracy of the jury, you never get an even number of jurors. The number of jurors must always be odd so as that there will be a clear verdict. With a jury, the job of the judge is to dish out the sentence according to the verdict of the jury. The verdict is given by the jury. So when there is a jury, the judge pretty much cannot do anything for the accused.
Well, that is pretty much all I would say, but I do want to point out that you are using a little too many povs.
On a side note, this is my preference, but I would have preferred if the princess was made the lawyer for the mage, the judicial committee as the judges, and a separate prosecution committee. Well, you need and policing force and that force would be the one doing the prosecution. The prosecution committee is not a part of the judicial committee but the committee that ensures order in the forest.
Thanks for this feedback. What country are you studying in BTW? I have always heard 12 in the US, but that might just be television. I don't understand it super well, but by my understanding the issue with the even number of jurrors is settled by the fact that they have to reach a unanimous verdict, or else it's considered a hung jury and the case has to be dismissed without a verdict.
I can believe the unanimous verdict being required, the US is pretty extreme in the innocent until proven guilty standard. So, that's 3 possible scenarios. Innocent, guilty, or hung jury. The accused walks in all scenarios except for "guilty." It is made a little more complicated by the fact that a hung jury is only called after the judge decides they have been deliberating so long that more deliberation is not going to help them reach a verdict, which usually means they've been deliberating for multiple days. Most juries will have people who will just change their vote to agree with the majority just to get all of this over with after it's gone on for that long.
Now that you've said this though, I am actually not so certain about the standard for death-sentence cases in the US. So many states have banned the death penalty, and it is rarely used in the few that do have it. As a result, I think most of the cases I've learned about actually were not death penalty cases. I have been assuming the standard of a standard criminal level case so far, there's a good chance I HAVE been doing it wrong. I'm going to have to look up the US standard for death penalty cases now.
Either way, your objection here is sorta settled by the fact that it was mostly magi and senior warriors brought in. The magi are people who typically DO serve as judges in this society. So, all it would take to adapt things to what you're talking about is a little bit of a language tweak in the re-writes.
@SmallHiki There's actually a plot reason why the princess was made the judge. In case you haven't noticed, the queen has been acting rather strangely. Aerien is very much aware it's completely inappropriate for her to judge this case, and it's been brought up a few times and will be brought up in greater detail again.
@Jemini Well not to fault if there were any inaccuracies, as a novel is a look at the world as an author sees it.
In any case, I am not from the US and study English legal system where juries are only used in the lower courts, they do the non-indictable offences (MOST crime except serious ones like rape and murder).
@SmallHiki Yeah, I'm trying to cover for the points I lack in knowledge, only giving details where I'm relatively more confident and leaving the rest to be assumed to have been communicated off scene either by Steven the lawyer or by reading the notes Gailben took based on what he said. Aerien herself also doesn't have much more than a layman's understanding of the law (which helps in my approach,) so that's yet another thing that actually makes her completely inappropriate as a judge (but is being forced into the position anyway.)
Yeah, if you studied law and are made uncomfortable by this situation, well... you should be uncomfortable. There are a lot of things wrong here that I intended to be very wrong, with Aerien being the judge being the most wrong thing among them.
@Jemini Apparently, I made a blunder here.
I am sorry, but it really is 12 jurors! Sent me into a panic as I was revising my textbook for my finals. There was a mess up. Odd numbers are for the panel of judges to pass a verdict.
On that note, I decided to check it up, and the majority required for a verdict is more than but not equal to 9 jurors. Sorry for my mistake, problem in my class notes >_<.
@SmallHiki Well, now we're sounding pretty similar to the US system, except that it's just 1 judge still. 9 judges sounds like a good idea, but the US just has an absurd backlog of cases for judges to hear. I, as well as everyone else, blames the draconian drug policies in the us.
Personally, I do not use drugs. I would never even think about using recreational mind-altering drugs. I think it's stupid, harmful, and life destroying. It's just a bad thing to do. But, I also think criminalizing it creates way more problems than are just caused by drug users abusing their drug of choice, and one of those many many issues is the fact that there are simply not enough judges available to decide on more important issues like death penalty cases.
Drug laws are a mess in any case. I dunno why people want to compare it to alcohol when the effect is on totally different levels in the first place.