Looking for feedbck on If I

More lovingly harsh critique incoming:

Answers are good if they're answers the audience wants, but If I has kind of answered my question of "Who is this person?" with "Let me tell you the history of their race." So far Ani and Pike are both kinda blank. We know what Ani is, but she hardly reacted to it, and a character is largely how they act and react. So far both have just been lead along, either by each other or the rest of the cast.

Someone mentioned that the series needs an antagonist, but I think If I would improve with any opposing force at all. The closest thing we had to that so far was the absence who wanted to kick them out... but they wanted to be kicked back out topside anyway, so he wasn't really opposing them. And now they've fallen down again, but that's less an opposing force and more a whoopsie.

Without conflict or challenge, there isn't much of a story. Without showing how the characters take action, or react when faced with conflict and challenge, there's not much character. And those challenges can take many forms; they can be violent, verbal, personal, universal; but they have to take a form of SOME kind.

And on a tangential note, keeping the main characters oblivious (but not the audience) can be entertaining, keeping the audience oblivious (but not the characters) can be intriguing, but keeping the protagonists AND the audience oblivious just turns the story to stumbling nonsense.

I recognize that being oblivious and ineffectual kind of IS Ani's character, but as a protagonist, she NEEDS something more compelling than that. It could be patched in short order by showing her fighting against that nature, along with a legitimate hope of success; that keeps a useless character interesting, though it's a temporary patch that needs to be replaced with real progression before it gets tired. At some point Ani needs to find an actual role, and the sooner the better. And a proper conflict other than her habit of doing parlour tricks and falling off cliffs would give her the chance for a meaningful struggle.

If our protagonists weren't protagonists, and if this were the "breather episode" rather than the main story, everything would be fine. But so far the story is being carried by lore alone. To be honest, if I hadn't seen you tackle conflict and struggle so well in your previous series, I would have quit reading by now, rather than hold out to see where things might go when the real story kicks in. To your credit, you DO write good stories. It's just that with If I, I feel like I've spent all this time reading the prologue to one.

It's tempting to think that holding onto a handful of mysteries and questions, and slowly letting them crawl onto the pages, is the right way to go, because it seems more complicated or difficult than just throwing problems at the characters and letting them tackle them one by one, and therefore it's what a good writer would do. But putting a problem in front of your characters is a time-tested method that's proven to work. It's why detective stories start with a crime. We need to at least know what these characters are up against. Stories that are heavy on lore like this one typically have smaller conflicts at the beginning to provide friction while the details of the world are revealed, so that the real conflict can begin with all the worldbuilding already done. "Whoa, what's going on??" isn't a conflict that stays engaging for more than a scene or two, but If I has been working it almost exclusively since page 1, so it's well worn out by now. And what we DO learn about what's going on and the world's lore is going to be easily forgotten as long as we're learning it from history teacher characters, rather than seeing it applied to events and actions in a plot.