(no subject)
Mar. 6th, 2026 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSometimes you read a book at exactly the wrong time, and you're like 'god this stupid big fat fantasy novel. Why are you six hundred pages. Why is everybody Sexy. What's the point of you. I'm tired' and sometimes you read a book at exactly the right time and you're like 'thank god! actual worldbuilding!! somebody had a good time getting weird with this! please tell me more about how weird you're getting!!' and I think I could easily have gone either way on Tessa Gratton's The Mercy Makers depending on the four books I'd read just previous as well as the time of the moon. But as it happened, at the point I read it I was really hungering for something, ANYTHING that felt like it actually cared about depicting a unique and distinctive society with characters that felt like they actually belonged in that society, and The Mercy Makers gave me that in spades, so I ended up really high on it! I had a great time! Please understand that I mean it lovingly when I say that it felt like a visual novel high fantasy dating sim!
-- this is a bit disingenuous for me to say, I haven't actually played more than a bit of any of the long visual novel high fantasy dating sims I'm thinking of, but I have read extensively throughalias_sqbr's write-ups of them and the book profoundly reminded me of something like [alias_sqbr's description of] My Vow To My Liege, where a player character has to play a lot of really dramatic political games to decide the fate of the kingdom, while surrounded by Hot People, and different elements of the plot will play out depending on which Hot Person she's closest to --
Okay, so we are in a fantasy empire that is built around a central religion that values Balance and forbids Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques. Our heroine Iriset, of course, is an atheist who's wildly gifted with Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques, and is also the daughter of a criminal mastermind. Iriset and her father have carefully crafted a secret identity illusion so that everyone thinks that someone else is the Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery Mad Scientist Genius and that the famous criminal mastermind's daughter is just a nice girl who's not really involved, so that when her father eventually gets arrested -- as indeed is the inciting incident of this book -- Iriset can hopefully stay free and rescue him instead of also getting arrested herself as a famous magical heretic.
For some reason, however, after her father's arrest, Iriset -- whom everyone knows is a criminal heiress but, once again, thinks is a nice and sweet criminal heiress who's not really involved, rather than an amoral heretic mad scientist -- is sort of non-consensually invited to become one of the handmaidens of the Emperor's hot sister as part of complex political schemes, so she spends the rest of the book in the palace, where she meets the following hot people:
- the Emperor, an earnest and well-intentioned young man who is really devoutly religiously dedicated to maintaining the Balance of the Status Quo
- the Emperor's sister, Iriset's boss, whose job as per official tradition for the Emperor's sibling is to be a priestess who placates the religion's divine devil-figure by going and being really sexy at a shrine every day, but has political visions and ambitions for the Empire far beyond her Sexy Role
- the Emperor's fiancee, a very sweet princess from neighboring island kingdom, who is a fundamental element of the Emperor's sister's overarching plans for an empire that expands through marriage alliance instead of conquest
- a mysterious, suffering, untrustworthy fairy sort of creature who has been publicly imprisoned behind the Emperor's throne for the past several hundred years and is now just sort of a standard part of the decor
In addition to these obviously romanceable characters, Iriset also has an existing criminal boyfriend on the outside of the palace who she's attempting to get in touch with and coordinate with about Operation Rescue Her Dad, and she also meets a palace maid and a fantasy-nonbinary magical architect (uses one of several archaic gender forms) who in the dating sim version of this would probably be secret or hidden routes.
The first, like, two hundred pages or so of this six hundred page book are mostly just Iriset wandering around the palace, trying not to be too obviously a heretical mad scientist, building various schemes for father-rescue and trying not to get distracted by much she would quite like to bang any or all of these hot people. And, again, at another time I might have gotten bored, but at this point in time I was really just enjoying the slow rich worldbuilding. It's weird! It's interesting! Everyone always wears elaborate masks and facepaint except for the foreign princess who's confused by the whole system, and we've reinvented a different kind of four humors system so everybody's like 'well of course she would act this way, she's got too much ecstatic force in her system', and the political conversation about marriage reform refers to the law that forbids conquered peoples within the Empire from marrying within their own ethnic group for a certain number of generations, and there are several archaic genders that are no longer used and people have chat about how actually we should bring them back because two is an imbalanced number and four would be much more balanced -- what I'm trying to get at is that it feels like the people in this book think in ways that are shaped by their world, and not by ours. The plot in its actual happenings is constantly contriving itself so that Iriset will be pushed into a position where, eventually, she'll have to Rebel Against Empire, but the thought patterns that get us there feel distinctive and grounded in the world and setting that Gratton has built.
But eventually, of course, we are going to have to get some plot and it is obviously going to have to involve Chekhov's Heretical Plastic Surgery and messy identity porn. Midway through the book, it seems like Iriset has landed safely on the foreign princess route, but! alas! after some joyous hot tub sex (premarital sex is fine in this culture if it's gay but forbidden if it's heterosexual because that might involve reproduction outside of a god-blessed marriage) the foreign princess is MURDERED by POISON during GIRLS' NIGHT. Iriset's sexy boss, whose whole political project is bound up in this marriage alliance, immediately reveals that she's known the whole time that Iriset is a forbidden sexy heretical plastic surgery genius and blackmails Iriset into a FACE/OFF situation with the dead princess! Now everyone will think that Iriset was the one who was poisoned, and Iriset can marry the Emperor! No problems!
So the back half of the book is Iriset desperately pretending to be a foreign princess, failing to rescue her father from execution, trying to solve her 'own' murder, falling (of course) in love with the Emperor while also (of course) becoming increasingly radicalized pro-heresy and anti-Empire. On the one hand this is all much more interesting plotwise than the first three hundred pages, and on the other hand about one in every three scenes is Iriset and the Emperor having athletic sex, so that did start to get a bit dull for me ... anyway, despite her Feelings and all the athletic sex, eventually Iriset becoming so rat-in-a-trap frustrated with her position that she stages a big dramatic magical rebellion event for her escape.
This is part one of a duology so we end on CLIFFHANGER; on the one hand I might not be in so exactly the right mood for the next six hundred page book when it comes out and perhaps it's best to leave it here as a book that I had a pretty good time with, and on the other hand part of the CLIFFHANGER is the Emperor's Sexy Sister deciding to use Chekhov's Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery to impersonate her brother and take over the Empire, and I do kind of want to see how that plays out. So we'll see! But despite the fact that I think it could easily have been two hundred pages shorter, I did enjoy this one and I think there's a lot of interest in the world that Gratton's built.
-- this is a bit disingenuous for me to say, I haven't actually played more than a bit of any of the long visual novel high fantasy dating sims I'm thinking of, but I have read extensively through
alias_sqbr's write-ups of them and the book profoundly reminded me of something like [alias_sqbr's description of] My Vow To My Liege, where a player character has to play a lot of really dramatic political games to decide the fate of the kingdom, while surrounded by Hot People, and different elements of the plot will play out depending on which Hot Person she's closest to --Okay, so we are in a fantasy empire that is built around a central religion that values Balance and forbids Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques. Our heroine Iriset, of course, is an atheist who's wildly gifted with Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques, and is also the daughter of a criminal mastermind. Iriset and her father have carefully crafted a secret identity illusion so that everyone thinks that someone else is the Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery Mad Scientist Genius and that the famous criminal mastermind's daughter is just a nice girl who's not really involved, so that when her father eventually gets arrested -- as indeed is the inciting incident of this book -- Iriset can hopefully stay free and rescue him instead of also getting arrested herself as a famous magical heretic.
For some reason, however, after her father's arrest, Iriset -- whom everyone knows is a criminal heiress but, once again, thinks is a nice and sweet criminal heiress who's not really involved, rather than an amoral heretic mad scientist -- is sort of non-consensually invited to become one of the handmaidens of the Emperor's hot sister as part of complex political schemes, so she spends the rest of the book in the palace, where she meets the following hot people:
- the Emperor, an earnest and well-intentioned young man who is really devoutly religiously dedicated to maintaining the Balance of the Status Quo
- the Emperor's sister, Iriset's boss, whose job as per official tradition for the Emperor's sibling is to be a priestess who placates the religion's divine devil-figure by going and being really sexy at a shrine every day, but has political visions and ambitions for the Empire far beyond her Sexy Role
- the Emperor's fiancee, a very sweet princess from neighboring island kingdom, who is a fundamental element of the Emperor's sister's overarching plans for an empire that expands through marriage alliance instead of conquest
- a mysterious, suffering, untrustworthy fairy sort of creature who has been publicly imprisoned behind the Emperor's throne for the past several hundred years and is now just sort of a standard part of the decor
In addition to these obviously romanceable characters, Iriset also has an existing criminal boyfriend on the outside of the palace who she's attempting to get in touch with and coordinate with about Operation Rescue Her Dad, and she also meets a palace maid and a fantasy-nonbinary magical architect (uses one of several archaic gender forms) who in the dating sim version of this would probably be secret or hidden routes.
The first, like, two hundred pages or so of this six hundred page book are mostly just Iriset wandering around the palace, trying not to be too obviously a heretical mad scientist, building various schemes for father-rescue and trying not to get distracted by much she would quite like to bang any or all of these hot people. And, again, at another time I might have gotten bored, but at this point in time I was really just enjoying the slow rich worldbuilding. It's weird! It's interesting! Everyone always wears elaborate masks and facepaint except for the foreign princess who's confused by the whole system, and we've reinvented a different kind of four humors system so everybody's like 'well of course she would act this way, she's got too much ecstatic force in her system', and the political conversation about marriage reform refers to the law that forbids conquered peoples within the Empire from marrying within their own ethnic group for a certain number of generations, and there are several archaic genders that are no longer used and people have chat about how actually we should bring them back because two is an imbalanced number and four would be much more balanced -- what I'm trying to get at is that it feels like the people in this book think in ways that are shaped by their world, and not by ours. The plot in its actual happenings is constantly contriving itself so that Iriset will be pushed into a position where, eventually, she'll have to Rebel Against Empire, but the thought patterns that get us there feel distinctive and grounded in the world and setting that Gratton has built.
But eventually, of course, we are going to have to get some plot and it is obviously going to have to involve Chekhov's Heretical Plastic Surgery and messy identity porn. Midway through the book, it seems like Iriset has landed safely on the foreign princess route, but! alas! after some joyous hot tub sex (premarital sex is fine in this culture if it's gay but forbidden if it's heterosexual because that might involve reproduction outside of a god-blessed marriage) the foreign princess is MURDERED by POISON during GIRLS' NIGHT. Iriset's sexy boss, whose whole political project is bound up in this marriage alliance, immediately reveals that she's known the whole time that Iriset is a forbidden sexy heretical plastic surgery genius and blackmails Iriset into a FACE/OFF situation with the dead princess! Now everyone will think that Iriset was the one who was poisoned, and Iriset can marry the Emperor! No problems!
So the back half of the book is Iriset desperately pretending to be a foreign princess, failing to rescue her father from execution, trying to solve her 'own' murder, falling (of course) in love with the Emperor while also (of course) becoming increasingly radicalized pro-heresy and anti-Empire. On the one hand this is all much more interesting plotwise than the first three hundred pages, and on the other hand about one in every three scenes is Iriset and the Emperor having athletic sex, so that did start to get a bit dull for me ... anyway, despite her Feelings and all the athletic sex, eventually Iriset becoming so rat-in-a-trap frustrated with her position that she stages a big dramatic magical rebellion event for her escape.
This is part one of a duology so we end on CLIFFHANGER; on the one hand I might not be in so exactly the right mood for the next six hundred page book when it comes out and perhaps it's best to leave it here as a book that I had a pretty good time with, and on the other hand part of the CLIFFHANGER is the Emperor's Sexy Sister deciding to use Chekhov's Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery to impersonate her brother and take over the Empire, and I do kind of want to see how that plays out. So we'll see! But despite the fact that I think it could easily have been two hundred pages shorter, I did enjoy this one and I think there's a lot of interest in the world that Gratton's built.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-06 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-06 09:31 pm (UTC)All of that sounds great to me; the actual plot, less so.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-06 11:42 pm (UTC)this sounds exactly like the kind of nonsense I love--
This is part one of a duology so we end on CLIFFHANGER
nooooo
no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 01:56 pm (UTC)That said, the cliffhanger ending is the sort that's like 'This Arc of the story is definitely done and the status quo has dramatically shifted' that feels like a pretty natural pause point ...
no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-07 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-09 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-09 03:20 pm (UTC)I relate deeply to the craving for some actual worldbuilding!
no subject
Date: 2026-03-09 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-10 12:57 am (UTC)