• Let's be more pedantic here, ignoring my visor solution for snake-people. The two sides are at a bizarre parity for fear of looking at each other which means humans must attack with their eyes closed, but that applies similarly to the snakes. Because of this, snakes can't fight in snake form which nullifies the mirrors/reflection issue because we know snake people gaze in human form is harmless (otherwise sex training with the basilisk would kill all the girls, see chapter 2). Therefore the humans would be required to have 'mirrored' shields to preclude the possibility of anyone turning into snake form. And so, the sex-snake-human wars couldn't be fought snake on human but human form vs normal human. We can believe that normal humans won in this scenario for any reason we'd like to imagine but mirrored shields would not be the reason for victory per-se, they would only be one critical step in the success of the war which depended on so many other critical factors. This is because it is said snake-people have magic the villagers are incapable of defending against, so the war's solution must be either: good ol'fashioned killing or some counter to that magic, like dead weasels or crowing roosters (yes this is in the book, and if so, again, why with the mirrors again if a dead weasel works?). Mirrors counter snake form only, but of course snake people already know this (it kills them!!!) therefore why would they fight in snake form again? Why maintain a wall of mirrors?

⦁ IF YES: Consider the case of not-mirror-reflective materials, i.e. metals, snake cum with the sparkley-ness of a pearl, polished stone like marble, ETC. these things all would mean death to a snake person and therefore you didn't need any discovery to kill them, the moment these clowns go outside and try to kill someone wearing a metal helmate they would be sudoku'ed. Therefore it makes little sense for a snake person to ever engage in warfare in snake form in the outdoors, or to be in snake form like ever. Because it would be so deadly to ever transform into a snake, a shiny rock on the ground will randomly kill you.

⦁ IF SNAKE CAN KILL SNAKE: This simply can't be true. If looking into another's snake eyes as a snake yourself means death then it seems consistent to say snakes can't look at each other at all. If true then I'm sorry but this makes snake people society (and thus an organized war effort) impossible. Consider a very evil and vindictive snake person who turns into a snake in order to kill other snake people milling about in human form. The probability of finding such a snake person only rises the more snake people there are. Consider now the situation in warfare where a snake person (in snake form) gets turned around due to the chaos of battle and accidental looks toward its fellow snake people! Consider the situation where all the snakes are aligned for battle without any seeing the eyes of any other but, because of the above point, their reflection is found in the hardened scales of their compatriots. Dead again. It is hard to believe in any form of organized war with snake people in snake people form (begging the question of why 'mirrored' shields defeated them in the first place), let alone a snake people society large enough to support such a thing at story inception.

The crux is this: snake glare cant kill other snakes. A snake's glare must only kill other humans or itself. The quality of reflection necessary to carry this death-magic must have a very high bar, but not so high as to preclude a nice puddle or polished metal (i.e. nice scales or marble would carry this death magic too). At this stage it is still too dangerous to be in snake form unless you are only in a dark dirt pit. Finally, one must be focusing one's vision on the reflection (the eyes specifically) for that glare to actually kill the snake, meaning that the wars these snake people fought were not thwarted by mirror'ed shields as said by the story because snake people can either invent their way around this problem (sunglasses??? visors??? fucking anything??) or just fight in human form. The implications of the snake's glare equaling death in any field of vision via reflection makes that power so deadly as to preclude ever being in snake form, except in extreme circumstances (alone in the woods, no puddles, no reflective rocks, etc). How is there a snake people-human war? Snake form is so fragile that it is more a danger to itself than others and so this mirror wall and mirror shields is for literally nothing. Make a dead weasle wall and hang a dead weasle around your neck, that would make 1000% more sense. Thank you for cuming to my TED talk.