User blog comment:SaynaSLuke/The Ocean's Echoes/@comment-2142396-20160804180913/@comment-2142396-20160815175912

Oh, I guessed that Xzaris’s father never married Kia, but I had no idea that Xzaris has half-siblings – especially since you mentioned once that no one protested that Xzaris adopted the name of his father’s House, so I assumed Xzaris’s father had no living family left. I suspected that Qi and Tai are going to be important later, but I couldn’t have suspected that! I can already feel another of my crazy ideas creeping up… Qi was mentioned to have lavender eyes, and that’s pretty rare eye color – I believe there were only two beasts in your story with such eyes: Esmund and Aisha. So what if Qi and Tai are also distantly related to Scound and thus of the royal House?

It’s an interesting view that Xzaris would’ve been more useful to Kia if he were a girl, since normally it’s the other way around, like it were with Xzanthia. But I would’ve thought that Xzaris could’ve still be useful round the tavern, as a kitchen helper or errand boy, though it’s true that it wouldn’t have brought in a lot of money… and since Xzaris looks mostly like his father, I believe Kia would’ve despised him anyway. :(

Hmm, it looks like ‘The Challenger’ is going to be way darker than I thought… I probably should have used to the fact that your writing deal with complicated moral ideas and dark themes, but I just didn’t expect something like that out of ‘Redwall’ rewrite – though once you think of it, there were pretty creepy moments even in the original novel.