skygiants

I stayed up until 5am finishing the book and came back to this entry to finally read it. I feel like…I don't really disagree with any of your points, except maybe about how the themes necessitate Gen dying at the end. But what my reread of the series really showed me is that gods aren't putting their hand on the scale for Gen out of idle amusement; they're his allies, because his cause is an existential threat for them too. It seems clear that if the Mede wins the gods of the Little Peninsula will be gone in a generation as well. So their interventions in this book made sense to me on that level.

And the other thing I would say is that in my view the hinge of the whole series really is the first chapter of The Queen of Attolia, when the gods tell Atttolia to nail boards at head height in the wood so that she can catch Eugenides. They don't hesitate to be ruthless when they need to be; Gen even says in this book that he'd have been a totally different man if he hadn't lost his hand, but the gods needed him to be the man he became after he did, and so they didn't hesitate. So the fact that he survives when quite a lot of other people die says to me that it wasn't actually necessary. Thanks to Pheris, he doesn't overreach; he doesn't go too far into self-indulgence either.

I would say the actually authorially indulgent thing is Relius surviving, tbh. And I too appreciated the authorial trolling of Teleus/Relius while refusing to confirm or deny Costis/Kamet, because lol.