If only, omg :,( could see Rags just breaking down into tears and all the fighting suddenly halts

You bring up some great points and I can’t fully decide on my position but I do want to bring one thing to light. Thus far Laken has only dealt with Goblin raiding parties. They will be structured differently. Every Goblin is armed, they’re hiding, and they’re focused in one direction: Riverfarm.

In contrast, we have the Flooded Waters tribe. Yes, Laken probably won’t notice children. But he’ll see the pack animals, the wagons full of supplies, the unarmed Goblins. He’ll see the cooking pots and lines for food vs the rations the Goblin raiding parties would eat. They’re making no effort to hide, and they’re most likely not heading directly to Riverfarm. This stuff is obvious at a glance, and at the very least should warrant a bit more observation besides assuming it’s more of the same.

He could ultimately come to the wrong conclusion, even with more observation. But I think it’s fairly clear that this tribe would look remarkably different than what he’s observed thus far.

did you miss the whole point of these past few chapters?

Are u even reading??? Lmao

You actually absolutely can excuse. Omniscience is just a buzzword without context.

The above comment is horrendous because it entirely misses the fact that Laken was CHECKING INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE of a town that at best likely pushes A FEW HUNDRED. He was looking for them, in specific, in a context where they couldn’t waste any time because any second lost could be someone dead and lost to the snow. He also had to, very specifically, spend hours and hours just to find specific plants when given instructions and general descriptions of what to look for. Laken has never been Omniscient; he does not flex his will a little and he magically gets a zoomed in and rather detailed examination of everything in a expansive area effortlessly. Or did I miss the part where he instantly felt the pests under the village ground, rather than needing to realize he could look down and then doing so?

Review, again, the actual context of those individual villagers he could look at “so minutely he could decide what they were and their condition”. First off, they are humans. Call it racist if you wish, but differences between species are undeniable. Things you can notice on a close look, but then you are presupposing there was a close look. How do you know? Second off, and pertinent to that, Laken has had a grand total of 2 direct encounters with Goblins and a number of indirect contacts, and every single time the circumstances were the same; raiding parties of hostiles fielding soldiers. That’s how he and his subjects almost lost their lives, that’s how his nascent empire even started as the destroyed villages and pillaged towns either flocked to him or sought the support of his nascent military forces for safety. Laken, in this context, has no darned incentive to check minutely for non-hostiles, the little information he does have is of a massive body of goblins gobbling up the small garrison of another town (oh yeah, he totally knows the goblins retaliated because other goblins were being hunted and that they didn’t pursue stragglers), and there’s no information he has access to informing of such a massive tribe anywhere in the first place. At least, an individual tribe unrelated to both the one already attacking his vicinity multiple times (Tremborag), or the Goblin King and his many raiding parties that have already razed multiple towns. He’ll be looking at them as a military target and focusing to that purpose, not checking if there’s babies and kids.

You cannot, in any way that is honest, take this narrative about biases and circumstances and simply blame Laken without a second thought because he has ran off every actual interaction he’s had with goblins. There was a mistake in not taking a closer look because he could absolutely have seen Goblin Kids or completely unarmed Goblins. But to act like it’d be impossible for him to miss that, or miss accounting for that, or that he’s an hypocrite for not perfectly upholding “judging people by their actions” without accounting for the wide picture, or that he’s an actual war criminal as if he intended to kill kids and wouldn’t think twice to keep going if someone let him know and he believed them, is so annoyingly disingenuous. There’s nothing objective about that assessment.

Selling weapons was where I drew the line. Keep the weapons for defense. Hide the actual mechanisms with false walls and such, demonstrates to the noble you’re not to be fucked with while hiding the mechanism. Once he sells it, it’ll be reverse engineered thus he loses his tech advantage. Sell food and desserts like the cinnamon rolls to the nobles. Sell easily replicable recipes like burgers, pizza, pigs in a blanket, tacos, meat buns, etc. become the food nation, not the weapon nation

Please kill rags already, she doesn’t deserve to be a main character. She just killed a human army on his lands and is mad they retaliated?

just as bad as goblin lord