:privTri: Volpeon Extra (@areon)

I completed reading www.royalroad.com/fiction/92699/kin-of-jormungandr as part of my research into other stories based on non-human protagonists.

It's definitely one of the better-written ones on such sites. It never got boring despite the focus being a snake who most of the time doesn't speak. And it showed that "creature who can shrink at will" doesn't have to be a mere gimmick that only exists because it's convenient for the main character. It's established right from the start that the snake can grow and shrink, it's a core aspect of his survival, and it stays relevant throughout the story. This is such a huge contrast especially from anime where its sole purpose is being a shortcut to avoid complexity.

Unfortunately, the story got confusing at times. It's takes place in the same universe as another story by that author and neglects to explain a lot of things, so I ended up having images in my mind that just were weird or turned out to be wrong later. The descriptions involving spatial distortions were also confusing before I got used to it. And it took the classic shortcut that there's just one universal language.

(mild spoiler I guess)
Most unfortunately, towards the end it went in a different direction than I was hoping for: a battle with global stakes among beings so incomprehensibly powerful that they simply become unrelatable to me. I always felt this way about characters exceeding a certain level of power.