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Oct. 11th, 2020 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsMy experience of rereading the Queen's Thief series in preparation for the finale, Return of the Thief:
The Thief - I had forgotten how much I enjoy early Gen narration, this is really fun!
Queen of Attolia - Attolia's stonefacedly adversarial relationship with the gods is suddenly the most interesting part of the series for me
King of Attolia - I love Costis
Conspiracy of Kings - well, I'm glad to have reread this again for the thematic resonance and to remember plot threads that I'm fairly sure will come up again ... where is Costis
Thick as Thieves - friendship ended with Attolian royalty, Costis and Kamet are my best friends now
In retrospect there were advantages and disadvantages to rereading the whole series first ... the advantage is that I could look at, for ex., Conspiracy of Kings and go 'well, I bet Ion Nomenus is gonna show up again!' and then both care and feel smug when he did. The disadvantage is that my heart is still too full of Costis and Kamet to remember how to care about Attolian royalty again ...
In other news, my experience was a little colored by having accidentally seen a fic tagged 'Costis/Kamet,' 'Relius/Teleus,' and 'Canon Queer Character' before getting my copy of the book and thinking to myself "well, if it's the Relius/Teleus that's explicitly textual instead of the Costis/Kamet I am going to be really mad and I am also going to laugh extremely hard." I mean, full respect to Megan, it is top tier trolling to stare me straight in the face and hold up a sign that says "YES I ABSOLUTELY KNOW QUEER PEOPLE EXIST" and then flip it around to show that the back says "I STILL REFUSE TO UNAMBIGUOUSLY CONFIRM THESE ONES, JUST TO SPITE YOU PERSONALLY."
Anyway, as I glumly toldgenarti today, unfortunately the end result of this is I can still think of nothing but Costis and Kamet and therefore despite having previously had no plans to do so I am inevitably going to be requesting Return of the Thief: The Costis and Kamet Cut for Yuletide -
genarti: Ah, you are Back On Your Bullshit.
Me: Yes. I am Back On My Bullshit.
But not entirely on my bullshit! I really enjoyed the majority of this book; I truly loved Pheris and his various moral dilemmas and all the Erondites Family Drama. (As I have seen others say, I would definitely be interested to see some writing on the series in general and this book in particular through the disability in kidlit lens.) I am somewhat less interested in late-stage Eugenides blossoming into his full Lymondization. I did not particularly enjoy certain reveals along the lines of, like, like, Eugenides Was So Dangerous He Was Sentenced To Death By The Eddis Council Before The Thief Even Began! Have we not already been told how brilliant and lethal he is enough? Is it really necessary to retroactively stack the deck?
I also wish ... hmm. This is another way in which a reread was possibly a mistake, because I had truly forgotten Attolia's wary mistrust of the gods in Queen and I really miss it especially now that the gods have stopped sending Gen terse messages to stop whining and have started instead reliably showing up for him with personal lightning bolts. For the number of times that people warn each other not to offend the gods throughout these books, none of our protagonists truly ever do, do they? Every time someone makes a difficult and potentially blasphemous choice -- breaking a sacred truce, stealing from Eugenides' altar -- it turns out that the gods were totally fine with it, just this once, because it needed to be done. I do wish the help of the gods had come at a higher cost, that we hadn't quite been done struggling against them yet. But this is mostly me being on my bullshit again, when it comes to wrestling with the gods.
(Actually, a part of me thinks that it might have been more narratively satisfying if Eugenides had in fact died in the pass when the gods were done with him, in balance for the divine finger on his side of the scales through so much of the book and indeed the series. And obviously part of me doesn't, because then the rest of the book would have been everyone else being devastated, and I do love all the characters, I don't wish to see them endlessly sad for the rest of the book. But.)
...all of which I think is going to make me sound more critical of the book than I am actually; I devoured it in a day, I enjoyed doing so very much, and I think, as a book itself and as the conclusion to an incredibly rich series, it's effective! For a peak reading experience I really probably should have saved Thick As Thieves for after, though.
The Thief - I had forgotten how much I enjoy early Gen narration, this is really fun!
Queen of Attolia - Attolia's stonefacedly adversarial relationship with the gods is suddenly the most interesting part of the series for me
King of Attolia - I love Costis
Conspiracy of Kings - well, I'm glad to have reread this again for the thematic resonance and to remember plot threads that I'm fairly sure will come up again ... where is Costis
Thick as Thieves - friendship ended with Attolian royalty, Costis and Kamet are my best friends now
In retrospect there were advantages and disadvantages to rereading the whole series first ... the advantage is that I could look at, for ex., Conspiracy of Kings and go 'well, I bet Ion Nomenus is gonna show up again!' and then both care and feel smug when he did. The disadvantage is that my heart is still too full of Costis and Kamet to remember how to care about Attolian royalty again ...
In other news, my experience was a little colored by having accidentally seen a fic tagged 'Costis/Kamet,' 'Relius/Teleus,' and 'Canon Queer Character' before getting my copy of the book and thinking to myself "well, if it's the Relius/Teleus that's explicitly textual instead of the Costis/Kamet I am going to be really mad and I am also going to laugh extremely hard." I mean, full respect to Megan, it is top tier trolling to stare me straight in the face and hold up a sign that says "YES I ABSOLUTELY KNOW QUEER PEOPLE EXIST" and then flip it around to show that the back says "I STILL REFUSE TO UNAMBIGUOUSLY CONFIRM THESE ONES, JUST TO SPITE YOU PERSONALLY."
Anyway, as I glumly told
genarti today, unfortunately the end result of this is I can still think of nothing but Costis and Kamet and therefore despite having previously had no plans to do so I am inevitably going to be requesting Return of the Thief: The Costis and Kamet Cut for Yuletide -genarti: Ah, you are Back On Your Bullshit.Me: Yes. I am Back On My Bullshit.
But not entirely on my bullshit! I really enjoyed the majority of this book; I truly loved Pheris and his various moral dilemmas and all the Erondites Family Drama. (As I have seen others say, I would definitely be interested to see some writing on the series in general and this book in particular through the disability in kidlit lens.) I am somewhat less interested in late-stage Eugenides blossoming into his full Lymondization. I did not particularly enjoy certain reveals along the lines of, like, like, Eugenides Was So Dangerous He Was Sentenced To Death By The Eddis Council Before The Thief Even Began! Have we not already been told how brilliant and lethal he is enough? Is it really necessary to retroactively stack the deck?
I also wish ... hmm. This is another way in which a reread was possibly a mistake, because I had truly forgotten Attolia's wary mistrust of the gods in Queen and I really miss it especially now that the gods have stopped sending Gen terse messages to stop whining and have started instead reliably showing up for him with personal lightning bolts. For the number of times that people warn each other not to offend the gods throughout these books, none of our protagonists truly ever do, do they? Every time someone makes a difficult and potentially blasphemous choice -- breaking a sacred truce, stealing from Eugenides' altar -- it turns out that the gods were totally fine with it, just this once, because it needed to be done. I do wish the help of the gods had come at a higher cost, that we hadn't quite been done struggling against them yet. But this is mostly me being on my bullshit again, when it comes to wrestling with the gods.
(Actually, a part of me thinks that it might have been more narratively satisfying if Eugenides had in fact died in the pass when the gods were done with him, in balance for the divine finger on his side of the scales through so much of the book and indeed the series. And obviously part of me doesn't, because then the rest of the book would have been everyone else being devastated, and I do love all the characters, I don't wish to see them endlessly sad for the rest of the book. But.)
...all of which I think is going to make me sound more critical of the book than I am actually; I devoured it in a day, I enjoyed doing so very much, and I think, as a book itself and as the conclusion to an incredibly rich series, it's effective! For a peak reading experience I really probably should have saved Thick As Thieves for after, though.
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Date: 2020-10-12 06:12 pm (UTC)The Hephaestean gods would probably have survived a Mede invasion, but they'd become less, like it seemed Immakuk and Ennikar had; just a small part of a tapestry of different depreciated religious beliefs, maybe seen on the stage in 200 years, maybe a broken shrine here or there, but no real devotees.
But this is just me muddledly trying to come up with some justification for deus ex machina that was maybe... not the best plot usage.
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Date: 2020-10-13 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-13 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-14 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-17 05:40 am (UTC)