LATE IS COOL I get notifs on these posts. And it's always fun to hear what other people think about this novel (especially because I feel less and less bad about how ?!?!?! I am about it with every new comment). Hello anon!

Re: Lavie. Yeah. You can't even really write that off as she's staying with Al because she ends up ... going with Al later anyway. The ONLY excuse I can think of is the whole point of Lavie's arc in the series being that she is Claus' navi no matter what, but in war time she can't do it, and maybe that was the reason why, because there would be fighting? But that's not even explicitly stated in the novel and to boot the rest of the odd writing would throw that off of feeling natural even if they had. :s

Al piloting SORT OF goes back to Travelers which takes place before this, where she and Holly are studying Lavie's notebooks together, and when they escape that one kidnapping attempt Al did handle the getting away and landing of the vanship pretty well. But beyond that there's not much to go on but assumption, and you don't see her really flying in Fam (actively as a pilot or navi I mean, she's in vanships at least).

And lmfao yes the whole Claus and Dio thing is just brain hurting. Not even just knowing THAT but seemingly having no ... plan as to what he would do once Dio started chasing him. He had literally NOBODY planned to back him up or anything to subdue Dio if he could have even gotten him down or something. And Claus should know, dumb as he can be, that he could not do something like that himself. So it was just like ok Claus, Dio is chasing you, gunning for you, now what? I'm sure "let him shoot me and he's surely snap out of it" was not part of any plan.

The time gaps in this was ridiculous. It's like I said, it sounds like they wanted to cover the whole two years between series, even though the time jumps don't match up canonically anyway... And they just did a bad job with that. The author was the one who also pushed for Claus in a wheelchair to make it into the series as canon from this anyway despite it being resisted. So it seems like a lot of the general ideas were very ... :V... from all standpoints. I mean if the staff isn't all on board for that...