First, no idea who Lan is, so the in-joke you repeated four times goes over my head.
Second, your second paragraph is a big part of why I didn’t like it. This was update 9 of 13, there are a tonne of subplots on the go that need satisfying resolutions, this is not the time to introduce a brand new one.
Third, I don’t care about any of these characters, I don’t care about the General, or Lorelei, or the three regents, or the three suitors, the houses that are loyal and the ones that aren’t.
Give me Chop-Chop. Give me Jerry. Give me Wenlin. Give me Maximus. Heck - give me Annie! Give me another fun interaction at the cabin. Give me more Orion - Luna interaction post sex. Give me more story development at Ulysses HQ. Give me more story development with Axel. Give me something in the WRE instead of just name dropping it. Give me more of the things you’ve already spent years developing and getting me to care about, not something brand new out of left field I have no connection with.
Thats why I didn’t like the elf part, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable, and it shouldn’t be difficult to understand.
Lan Mandragoran, one of the main characters in Wheel of Time. A brutally serious, no-nonsense warder (bodyguard for what is essentially a witch). He's dismissive of the protagonist at first, begrudgingly trains him, is impressed with his progress (even though he doesn't reveal it much) and gives extremely similar speeches to Arannis about duty, sacrifice, etc. Pic related is the main symbol of the Wheel of Time books by the way and the main plot is a reborn hero fighting against the big, invisible evil in a fight that's happened before. Huge subplot of the books is "dreamwalking" in a dream world where things you think of become real. And certain people have stronger abilities. Mostly women who can dreamwalk.
Towards the ends of the book one of the main characters learns one of the bad guys in the dreams is there "in the flesh" and can actually shift in and out at will. He learns to do it as well. The bad guys can do it via portals.
Also also the main character just happens to have a sort of harem with several scenes that are verbatim same as Eternum such as struggling with himself and declaring he loves them all, which is scandalous.
Also also also the main evil bad guy appears to the protagonist often as a vision and gives him philosophical talks about how it's all futile and it's an endless cycle.
I can go on, but as you can see there's a crapton of parallels. Thing is, WoT is old and engrained so heavily in fantasy with a ton of tropes so it's a biiit hard to judge if Cari is a WoT guy and is borrowing heavily or downwind of the tropes. He does seem to love all the games/things I personally love so I might be projecting a bit. Like, I was thinking while replaying 0.8 before 0.9 there should be a "Skyrim is still going on" joke and there actually was one lol
So yeh, Arannis was extremely similar to Lan. It's just a fun thing to note.
I get where you're coming from though. For me I don't mind Hyril'ar but with 5 updates to go it's just going to be extremely tough to fill in all the blanks you mentioned. I was not disappointed with the update because I loved Hyril'ar but I did find it lacking in terms of, well, Eternum. Felt like it was "Hyril'ar -> get sex scenes out of the way -> write their way out of the corner of the harem conflicts -> set up cliffhanger. Nothing was revealed or built upon. It depends how you look at it in the end. Filler can be excellent, you know.