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Pity Camuir will be denied the chance to redeem himself in mortal combat with the real villian.  By this time there are plenty who would be happy to settle for a tenth of him so long as they were assured the other nine-tenths were half as well taken care of.

How do you define 'that difficult'.  Hw do you weigh the development effort and possible inconvenience (to someone who hits the button accidentally, perhaps?) against the gain in time and preserved mental concentration of the users who benefit?

Of course, I still think that moving the 'negative' links under each of these posts to the side opposite the quote and edit buttons would be a good use of development (and testing) effort.

Would it make sense to add enough detail to Onnen's mention that it becomes a teaser, suggesting that there are details to be unfolded?

But there's more.  I've been mulling it, and I'm not at all convinced that this is the birth of a hero.  This could be as great a hunger as the two that contend at Blossom.

Except that some people with those differences nevertheless lead responsible lives.

In the language of anthropology, both are considered 'mutilation'.  Ear piercing and tattoos are also considered mutilation for this definition.

A great deal of polemic mischief is done by deliberately conflating the specialty (anthro.) meaning with the general meaning.

Language can conceal a lot of specious argument.  C.S.Lewis makes a point of this towards the end of Out of the Silent Planet, inspired in part by his education with 'Kirkpatrick'.  See Surprised by Joy, if you don't mind a long read for a single point.

I don't know if I can.  If I can't do it in 2015, I might yet be able to do it in 2018.  And if I never can do it, there may well be authors who can.

To say that you can't do it does not mean it can't be done, nor does it reduce the value of the achievement for those who can.  As I recall, a fellow named Aesop had something to say about the question.

Are you saying that you cannot imagine-create a scene that will move you to tears, or that reading such a scene after you've written it will not still move you to tears?

I'm not so sure about that.

There's a true story, a case out of the 1980's, when some hundreds or low thousands of Hmong people were quietly evacuated from Laos as refugees from the Communist takeover.  (The French called them Montiagnards, and I apologize for my poor spelling.)  They had many problems adjusting to American culture.  Some problems were mostly comic with a whiff of tragedy, like trying to grow rice in living room carpets.  Others were more severe.

One young man of the transplanted Hmong took a shine to an American girl and tried to get her interest.  She had no interest in him, so he did what he would have done back home in Laos: he got together with a bunch of his male friends and they kidnapped her.  They helped him rape her, in order to 'claim' her.

Not understanding their crime under Western culture and American law, they let everyone know what they did.  It was not difficult to convict them.

No rapist from within Western culture would advertise his act, or expect it to be approved by society.  He will know that his act is regarded as deeply wrong, even if he feels justified in it.

Social workers who were trying to help the Hmong assimilate approached the victim and she allowed them to explain things.  In what must surely represent a case for sainthood, she spoke at sentencing after the conviction and asked the judge to imposed a sentence recognizing  the moral and cultural ignorance, a sentence of mercy (which is often harder than simple leniency).

The Hmong culture fulfilled the first and indispensible requirement for a culture: it allowed the Hmong to survive through the centuries, as individuals and as a people.  And if we look carefully, we can find that things like the Stockholm Syndrome are likewise essential to survival of individuals and the human species when only that lowest of cultural requirements is filled.

I hope by this time you are screaming "WE KNOW BETTER!"  Yes, we do.  Not all cultures are equally good and moral, even though some 'lower' cultures may emphasize virtues that we have largely forgotten, or that we revile (the kind of courage necessary to challenge  and defeat a desperate food animal, for instance, or to defeat a neighboring clan's aggression).

Some cultures are better than others.  But all cultures face that indispensible first requirement of self-perpetuation.  A culture is not, and cannot be, a suicide pact.  The only cultures we know are the ones that survived long enough for us to see them, or to see their artifacts.

If Kha has been compromised, what about the earlier adventures, in which Kha's company averted disaster?

Uh-huh.

Regarding the review: 'twas Lewellen, not Valharic, who spoke of breathing.

See discussion here.