>>96152602Michelle, much as I love her, has said this is a deeply personal story to her, and it, uh, kinda shows.
Every aspect and action of each character seems to have some Deep Meaning in her heart, (mined from her own emotional struggles, probably,) but I don't really think she's done enough work to step back and extract that stuff from her own personal context to convert it into a form that makes us strangers feel the same way about it as she does.
So because we don't have the context or perspective she does, that she's telling the story based on, things about the story will seem to hit wrong notes for us. For example, I found it kinda hard to read through Wrava's attack, because it seemed like the most unreconstructed teenage power fantasy... If your sympathy isn't allocated in exactly the right way, that whole sequence and the followup to it will seem just wrong (or at least, it does to me...)
Making readers care about the right things in the right ways is one of the most fundamental duties of storytelling, and I'm afraid Ava's Demon is kinda shaky at it. But hey, uh, the art is gorgeous!
