If our defense, we don't use that word very often.

"if a reader doesn't like something or doesn't understand something then it's a failure of the writer" actually it might be because the reader skim-read or straight up skipped a lot of important parts of the story, or decided before starting what the story should be and got mad when it wasn't that.

also despite appearing mostly in flashbacks there's a lot of shalem material to work with.
also the tippi subplot just being yuri 👌