#or they become protagonists (irene in the thief)

[kareenvorbarra]

doomed to always be the only nahuseresh fan in the chat

[nimblermortal]

So @hello-delicious-tea​ and I have been discussing the existence of a Queen’s Thief television series, and how we agree that it should be animated, but moreover that each viewpoint character has a different animation style.

The Thief

Gen: First person viewpoint. We see his hands, but not himself, until the end. This underscores his Unreliable Narrative viewpoint, which is also expressed through flashbacks from multiple characters’ points of view, as they interpret things Gen is telling them (e.g. how he learned to climb and balance). Gen’s style generally is 90s animation, some cross between Atlantis and Animated Stories from the Bible (or Ghibli?). Gen is very biased; the Magus is drawn like Rasputin in Anastasia. In the reveal, the camera zooms out and we see Gen for the first time, and he looks a lot like Eddis. “Who Wore This Face Better” sort of a lot (Gen wore it better).

In The Thief, Gen’s art is very stylized, simple animation - but when he forgets himself, detail starts to creep in, or when he’s telling a story things get much more fine. This at first looks like it’s a tell for what is a story, but in the reveal we also switch to that more detailed animation, and you realize that this is who Gen actually is.

Irene: Is always in pre-Raphaelite mode, regardless of who is telling the story. She herself tells things in Angel’s Egg style, beautiful but with little to no color. Gen passes through her life and flushes everything into a bit of color around him, which is not always pleasant - in the dungeon scene, from Irene’s perspective, the color he makes is like the Ohmu in Nausicaa or the curse in Princess Mononoke: It’s very unpleasant and wrong, and she interprets this as bad, but it’s still color.

The Magus: The only part of the series that is done in live action. He notices things in detail for what they are. Even Gen is not animated. The only place CGI comes in is at The Cliff Scene, where from Gen’s perspective we got “I touched a sword and it was awful and I lost anyway” and from the Magus’s perspective we go full Shaolin Soccer on this thing.

Ambiades: Art style is notably similar to Gen’s. We only see his viewpoint once, perhaps, after you’ve figured out the POV thing. This is 100% fodder for The Meta - what about Ambiades is so close to Gen? The difference is that everyone in Ambiades’s perspective is drawn as a Disney villain, and Gen is drawn as the Anastasia-Rasputin figure. To further feed The Meta, Ambiades’s image of himself is also a Disney villain.

Sophos and Helen: are both Disney, but Sophos is 90s-to-modern Disney and Helen is Classic Disney.

The Queen of Attolia

Irene: We get much more Angel’s Egg perspective here, and what’s happening with the color around Gen becomes clear for the first time. Things somehow manage to get even more washed out as the war progresses. The Mede is in full stop sign red at all times.

Gen: Everything gets overlaid in blues, and we’re back to a relatively simple art style. When he finally gets talked into doing something, the detail snaps back into place, but we only start defeating the blue filter when he starts getting some humor back.

The Minister of War: ??

The King of Attolia

Costis: Anime. This is particularly entertaining as regards Gen, who goes through a progression of anime tropes (blank-faced, demonic, Way of the House Husband, 80s bishi hero...) before he gets protagonist hair. Costis himself is drawn as a background character.

Thick as Thieves

Kamet: Book of Kells approach to art, with Minoan wall art or Greek vases. Kamet is our viewpoint character, but is never represented. It is very clear that this is art that tells a story, and that Kamet does not consider himself part of that story. At the end of the arc, when Gen asks him where the army is, Kamet literally walks onto the page of the narrative in order to answer.

There is a Cretan octopus joke inserted into the animation.

Return of the Thief

Pheris: Starts out as basically Donald in Mathemagic Land. Pheris is in the middle, with no illusions about his own shape, but he’s in a halo of darkness where patterns and math happen around him. In the corners of the screen, there’s a fairly realistic art style as people talk about him and try to shift him, but even when he moves himself, he is walking across nothingness. This halo shrinks and grows depending on the scene and who is present, and it becomes clear that Pheris is in command of it, and chooses to live in his mathematical otherworld. It shrinks to nothingness in key emotional scenes, but tends to be larger when Pheris is declaring that he is an impartial observer.

[oatmealcrisp-freak]

I think the biggest difference between ACD and GR Sherlock, besides the panache, is that GR RDJ as Sherlock is consistently shown and said to be vulnerable. He’s often off his rhythm, quips are made at his expense, people get information before he does who then relay that to him, he gets drugged, and he’s told he’s vulnerable (or rather Blackwood is telling us that Sherlock is vulnerable which is easy to believe with RDJ’s big dark heavily lashed puppy dog eyes). Under the cut I grumble.

I think it’s a fun decision. I also think it’s a necessary one. In the ACD canon, the suspense of the mystery is built through our POV character Watson, who sees Sherlock but can’t quite follow Sherlock’s reasoning. This is necessary for the narrative - it’d be very difficult to suck us in otherwise if we saw the mystery unravel in chapter 2 and then spent the rest of the time gathering evidence to present it to the police. Thus, our audience proxy Watson becomes the lense we get to watch it unfold so we can have a jolly good time.

However, in the movies we see most of it through Sherlock’s eyes. It being a movie helps the suspense a little because we don’t have access to Sherlock’s internal narrative, as opposed to something written. But we know who Sherlock Holmes is, and so having him as the primary POV character really risks the suspense that keeps us hooked because, well, ofc he’s gonna solve the mystery and save everyone, he’s Sherlock Holmes. And the movie shows that he’s capable, if quirky. He’s a polyglot, he’s a fighter, he’s got. Like. Future sight in battle (which, notably, one of the only instances where there IS a a voice over of Sherlock’s thoughts so we can tell what tf is happening - it’s our preview into how his brain works, always several steps ahead of everyone else, and I think that’s done well), he thinks on his feet, he’s witty, he sees what others do not. That’s how we’re introduced to him. 

So again, how do you build suspense when that’s your primary POV character?

By telling the audience he’s vulnerable, by making him cry out for help, by having Watson deliver information to him because he’s ‘already read the letter’ before Sherlock. Now Sherlock does that to Watson too a couple of times later on, but that’s within the context of that part of the mystery. How Watson does it introduces that part of the mystery, and it also introduces that method - “I already know, now I tell you”. And then he snarks about Irene Adler paddling Sherlock up the Thames, after we’ve seen Sherlock be vastly unsettled by said thief. Jokes at Sherlock’s expense, so many of them. Making him emotionally unsettled because he feels he’s losing Watson and suddenly his ex is back. Etcetc.

It’s a bit heavy handed maybe but I enjoy it for that. We love a by turns highly vulnerable highly capable protagonist.

Now ACD’s Sherlock is not like that. He’s shown to have emotions, and he’s even shown to rethink his stance and be wrong, but very rarely are jokes made at his expense, very rarely is Sherlock made to feel fear of loss in any context. We are well assured that this is a highly capable man who is gonna solve the thing, you just wait and see. Sometimes it just takes a bit, sometimes he’ll even get frustrated, but he will carry through. He’s basically impenetrable throughout 99% of the stories as I’ve read them so far. I think it’s the abrupt and very skillful reversal of that which made his ‘death’ so notable in pop culture that it’s still so notable today, alongside him.

[gavinhalm]

Almost Out of Time – Destabilizing Western Narrative Temporality in Two Films by Zeinabu irene Davis, and Pierre H. L. Desir

"Immediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity and ubiquity are all so many attributes of divinity that each allow us to escape the historic conditions of humanity"- Paul Virlio, "The Futurism of the Instant"

In Paul Virilio's most recent book-essay, from which the above quote is taken, the author sketches out a theory of temporality that envisions a contemporary world where time has been fragmented and compressed via technology to such a degree that there is nothing left but an ever-present "instant".

While acknowledging his concern for the loss of "temporal diversity", due to a world encased within a singular sense of instantaneity, in which "all distinction(s) between past, present, and future" are obliterated (though this is, perhaps ultimately, a very Euro-centric, eschatological vision of teleological "progress"), I would like to briefly trace here the possibility, within two films by Zeinabu irene Davis and Pierre H. L. Desir, of a filmic sense of time that not only destabilizes Western narrative temporality, through the use of pixelation and time-lapse photography, but also allows for the idea of time compression and/or destabilization to be one of creative positivity.

--

In Zeinabu Davis's film, Cycles, the director visually introduces a female character within the space of her own home and nearby locale working the daily "duties" of homemaking (cleaning, scrubbing, etc.) through a complex visual technique involving pixelation, in which the camera records short snippets of the world which confront the viewer in a manner that cuts into the traditional expectancies of continuity within Western narrative action.

These scenes where the main character scrubs floors, walls, and bathroom tubs still retain a progressive (traditional) narrative action, but in their fragmented presentation they create a heightened sense of gender-specific oppression as well as allow for moments of sensuality that would otherwise seem completely out of place if presented as a continuous set of scenes.

Indeed, it is the fragmentation of presentation of the main character's existence in these moments that creates an atemporal lacuna within the film's action, and allows for the main character's non-verbal, sub-conscious world to also infuse the story. It is the very in-betweenness which exists between what is left out in the action, during the use of techniques such as image pixelation, that enables the viewer to experience not only the level of oppression of the duties imposed upon the female character, but also her psychological state in which she rewrites oppression as personal salvation through sensuality.

--

Likewise, Pierre Desir's film, The Gods and the Thief, also takes the viewer out of a traditional Western experience of narrative temporality, but does so in a very different manner while at the same time opening up the space of the film to it's own form of "spiritual time".

After the male protagonist (in the form of a kind of earth-bound, Vodun spirit) cuts a wandering, discursive path through a forest, while following an equally mysterious woman, we see him eventually dragging a box (shown in a series of non-linear quick cuts) that inexplicably grows larger to the point that it becomes an almost Sisyphean burden whose actual purpose is left for the viewer to conjure.

The conclusion of this set of scenes now finds the viewer in a new space consisting of a farm and accompanying buildings, and this is where the film's temporality becomes highly abstract through the use of exceptional time-lapse photography–Shadows ominously growing over the land, multiple shots of clouds quickly forming in the sky, and the sun cutting along the very edge of a wide rectangular matte placed in front of the lens.

These renderings also allow for a kind of atemporal, spiritual transcendence to "infuse" the film's narrative. It is here, in the space of the farm, that the director has us experiencing the world in the same way as the male protagonist/spirit: by completely speeding up the physics of earth-bound temporality, all the while never letting the sun slip into darkness. In the end, all of human-experienced nature becomes an object in the hands of a spiritual psychodynamics that fragments, burdens, repeats, stalls, and frustrates a Western experience of a teleologically lived or progressive time.

--

After viewing these two films, what one can begin to see is that, even after all the attempts at transcending Western metaphysical concepts of time from Nietzsche through Derrida, contemporary thinkers such as Virilio are perhaps still conceptually trapped within a worldview that would have the compression of time (via technological apparatus from film to computer hardware and software) given only as an absolute moment of “(i)mmediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity, and ubiquity"–An inverse take on a Judeo-Christian, atemporal, and beatific Absolute Moment a la Dante in the "Paradiso". The problem for Virilio is that this Moment is one that, due to the stretching, cutting, destroying, rearranging, and compressing of time via modern technologies, becomes violently a-historical and a threat to humanity on a whole. 

What films like Desir and Davis' do is to show that these techniques (and technologies) can engender the exact opposite: they open up the spaces between, and the forces that drive, such fragmentation into the spiritual and psychological planes of our lived experience.

[likewaterintodryearth]

Obliteration of Outdated Archetypes in MWT’s Queen’s Thief Saga

MWT saw the hegemonic patriarchal, traditionally binary stories of old and flipped them around upon their heads. Saw duality and gave us the spectrum of all infinite possibility and Oneness in its place: -Both the queens are older than their kings.

-Both the queens are more experienced than their kings.

-The female main characters are comfortable in their power while the male main characters are initially hesitant about accepting their power.

-Helen and Irene are predominantly extroverted while Sophos and Eugenides are predominantly introverted.

-The male characters shed far more tears in far more heart-shattering sobs collectively than the female characters across the series although all of them have their emotionally vulnerable moments that cement our love for them.

-Irene is taller than Eugenides.

-The Queen of Eddis carries herself like a soldier, is broad-shouldered and muscular, wears her hair “short like a man’s,” wears trousers most of the time and a soldier’s uniform when she’s fighting a war with her men on the front lines. -The men AND women of Eddis are trained as soldiers and when they are too old to fight, both men and women also help with the sewing (traditionally a woman’s task). -Irene hunts in her free time while Eugenides is like “no thanks, I’ve already been hunted in Attolia.” -The male main characters are more resistant to killing. (with the exception of maybe Costis as a soldier)  -The female main characters’ hands are more covered in blood than the male’s. (They did what needed to be done... with the exception of Kamet, who is male-bodied but on one level is the most effeminate of all, who is not morally resistant to killing but as a slave was forbidden to even look at a butterknife or remotely partake in the traditionally masculine activity of defense. -Eddis’s female attendants are armed just like her guards are.

-Sophos is as softly effeminate, sensitive, emotional, humble, empathetic and bunny-like as they come while looking like a strapping thug.

-Sophos the heir to the throne is imprisoned in his role and only finds psychological and emotional freedom when physically enslaved.

-Kamet is physically enslaved and yet slated to become one of the most powerful men in the empire.

-The Queen of Attolia who wields so much power is initially one of the most enslaved people in the land.

-The frightening, terrifying, savage, ruthless Queen of Attolia is also one of the most vulnerable, delicate, childlike, shy individuals imaginable. -Costis spends the entirety of KoA feeling or appearing humiliated, embarrassed, chagrined, bumbling and incompetent and then reappears in TaT as the one of the most skilled, competent, strong, strapping survivalists imaginable.  If I had to pick one of the main characters to be stranded on a deserted island with, I would choose Costis for sure.

-The Thief of Eddis’s late MOTHER was just as wild, daring, agile and free as her son and what sounds like it would be a male-dominant “profession” clearly was not. -Apparently, if you’re a royal thief, you can steal all manner of things without getting arrested.

-”Thief” means so much more than one who steals stuff.  A thief is a head spy, a manipulator on behalf of state, a magician, a a master of poker, deceit and cunning, an acrobat, a traceuse, a picture of grace and athleticism, -In every other story, the thief is the villain, the bad guy.  Here, the Thief is the HERO. -Irene rejects Nahusaresh, portrayed as the “masculine ideal” (tall, handsome, powerful, etc.) in favor of Gen.

-Sophos rejects the “conveniently beautiful, bird-brained” Berrone in favor of the non-traditionally attractive, brilliant Helen. -The Queen of Eddis can be found more likely sitting on the steps in front of her throne connecting with her court/people than sitting on her throne and yet she “would still be loved as queen even in a burlap sack.” -The Queen of Eddis is “not beautiful” in the traditional sense and yet she is so freaking beautiful and her people all agree with me.

-The fashionista of a the group is male (Gen) and apparently has better tastes in clothes than the Queen of Eddis.

-The Queen of Eddis’s prisoner of war is also one of her closest friends (the Magus)

-Eugenides foregoes a marriage to someone who has treated him with kindness and respect (Agape) to marry someone who has permanently disabled him and hurt him the most brutal way imaginable. -Kamet is Costis’s wife.  They are two male-bodied people.

-The physically weakest character is male (Kamet).

-The smallest character is male (Kamet).

-The character who has never even touched a weapon is male. (Kamet)

-The most initially violent and aggressive character is female (Irene). -The bluntest, most direct character is female. (Helen). -The most humble, submissive, easily embarrassed character is male. (Sophos) -The slave (Kamet) is “more educated” than the middle/working class free man (Costis). -The lead protagonist who wins the most beautiful woman in the land is a small man of color. -The economically poorest of the city-states (Eddis) is the most utopian, functional and abundant in personal integrity, cooperation and loyalty of its citizens. -The economically richest nation (Mede Empire) is the poorest in terms of integrity.  (I realize this we’re no longer talking about defying archetypes, but simply stating universal ironies. Can you think of anything I am missing? @artfrostedleaf @shebsart​ like we were talking about.  Thank you always for being as excited as I am to unfold the mysteries. @fuckyeahqueensthief I get your blog updates constantly and I am thankful to you for indulging my feverish passion for these books.

[rorykillmore]

10, 11 and 8 for jacquelyn, 6 and 33 for kara and 10 for moriarty

for jacquelyn

8. Describe how your character deals with failed or failing relationships, whether familial, platonic, romantic, sexual, or otherwise.  Do they easily let go of people, or are they more likely to hold onto a relationship for as long as they can? Does this affect how they form relationships?

jacquelyn is on all accounts… used to letting go of people, by now. the schism meant people died. the schism meant people betrayed her, that she had to abandon some of the people she once trusted, that severe ideological disagreements drove her away from a huge portion of the people she once relied on. 

if anything, that’s resulted in her being a little too black and white in her thinking – and her relationships. she’s more wary of people now, less willing to reconcile differences and give second changes. cutting people off without clinging to sentiment has long since become the safest option for her and… it’s not an easy thing to unlearn.

so yeah, a relationship faltering or becoming very strained is a thing that would Spook her.

10. If your character emptied the contents of their pockets/purse/backpack/etc., what would be inside? Do they often have a lot of stuff on them from day to day, or are they light packers?

this is a tricky question for jacquelyn just because i’m sure she’d carry like… all manner of vfd bullshit and that kind of stuff is hard to flesh out but. i’m gonna say that if she’s on a Mission, the contents she’s carrying would probably extremely useful and lowkey dangerous but it’d look like a bunch of nonsensical, quirky bullshit to everyone else. the eyeglass is a pretty good example of what i mean. 

she has the eyeglass with her pretty much constantly, in fact, but apart from that she usually travels pretty light on an average day.

11. Just for fun: If your character was the protagonist of a fantasy RPG, what would their class be?

possibly some kind of mage but more than likely some kind of thief/rogue/assassin class. She Shady. except not really but when she’s trying to get shit done… She Shady.

for kara

(IM ASSUMING YOU MEANT 3 AND NOT 33 SO)

3. Would your character have fun in an art museum?  Or would they be bugging their friends to leave the whole time?

yes!!! lesser known fact about kara: she’s an artist, herself. she really favors drawing and painting in particular, and it’s something of a stress release hobby for her. that being said, earth’s art history actually isn’t… something she’s studied extensively? so she couldn’t go to an art museum and spout out all these facts about different artists and their styles or anything, but… she does have an eye for what’s good, and a definite appreciation for other people’s work. she’d enjoy a day at an art museum quite a bit, tbh.

though i mean, look at the people kara’s friends with – most of them would be bugging her to leave.

6. Is your character easily creeped out by ghost stories, horror movies, scary images, etc.? If so, what kinds of stories scare them the most? Why?

surprisingly, yeah, kind of?? for someone nearly invincible, it’s pretty funny how earthly a lot of her fears are – she doesn’t like snakes, scary movies creep her out, etc. 

not that she won’t watch them – she can be talked into it, though it means a lot of very jumpy reactions from her and probably a lot of amusement from everyone else involved. i don’t know if there’s a particular type that scare her more – she’d have more fun than anything with monster movies, i think, because like… hey, she’s used to fighting big monsters!

but i think she’d find more… claustrophobic, psychological films unsettling. and well-done space horror would be a little bit unnerving for her. what i’m saying here is that “alien” would or probably already has scarred her for life.

for moriarty

10. If your character emptied the contents of their pockets/purse/backpack/etc., what would be inside? Do they often have a lot of stuff on them from day to day, or are they light packers?

depending on the day? you’d either find some fairly scant, unremarkable stuff (her id [reads irene adler, ofc], some business cards, money, beauty and hygiene supplies) ooor something specifically tailored to… whatever kind of identity she’s trying to project. when she’s working to fool someone, she really nails even the tiniest details – which is why even someone as deductive as sherlock had a hard time figuring her out.

one thing you won’t find, under most circumstances, is anything incriminating. moriarty is the opposite of the “trips and ___ falls out of my purse” meme, barring cases where it’s perhaps intentional. she’s smart enough not to keep anything suspicion-inducing on her unless she happens to need it.

[convenientalias]

@attoliasirenides said @convenientalias so why queen of attolia?  (attempt to start a conversation about my favorite book and character of all time even though KOA is better written QOA has more Irene.                            

(Sorry I can’t respond to comments, I can only copy and paste...but anyways...let me talk about QoA for just a minute pls. I said it was my favorite book and I did not lie. Also, no one ever asks me stuff like this.)

There are a couple reasons. First of all it has to do with the time in my life when I read the books, since I read all of them months apart from each other. And of course I was shocked every time the style/POV changed. Queen of Attolia was the worst shock, since I had only read The Thief at that point, and I was probably a bit too young for it ;) so I had very mixed feelings. While there were elements I loved (which I will get to in a second) I hated how long it took Gen to get over his injury--the whole “recovering from trauma” aspect was something it took me a while longer to appreciate. And I was annoyed by the slow pace of the book. But then I reread it over and over again, and as I got older I appreciated it more and more.

I have a theory that eventually my favorite may become a different book in the series because I haven’t reread the others as much, but then there are other reasons it’s my favorite two.

So now the actual, slightly more objective reasons:

Queen of Attolia has the highest concentration of Irene. THIS IS A HUGE POINT IN ITS FAVOR. I’m just gonna say right now that I loved Irene even reading The Thief, and I was really excited when QoA made her more sympathetic without taking away her coldness and brutality, her ability to do what was necessary. If anything, it expanded on those aspects of her. I just really love female villains, and while Irene isn’t really a villain anymore, she still has everything I like about them: the power, the ruthlessness, the ability to actually effect change in the book and be a threat to the protagonist. SO cool. And she’s allowed to be those things and also be selfless, focused on her country rather than herself. And have a vulnerable side as well, and even fall in love. Without losing her edge. SUCH A GOOD CHARACTER.

Queen of Attolia also has a more coherent plot than King of Attolia. (Sorry, KoA, you’re right up there with my favorites but I’m gonna diss you right now.) For a couple reasons: One, it follows two main character arcs rather than skipping all over the place with side characters. Two, it has a clear objective: Get Gen out of his funk and end the war. Three, it has a well defined romantic subplot which ties the two main character arcs together. KoA is a good book but it doesn’t have a very centralized plot and it also lacks the epic stakes of QoA. It’s kind of like the difference in the Prydain Chronicles between, say, The Black Cauldron and Taran Wanderer: One is a game-changing tale of adventure and intrigue and the other is a character focused interlude.

KoA is focused on a smaller time frame and the development of matters at court, and showing one specific character’s rise to power: Gen. But we already know Gen is a good king, and we already know he’s going to get the court to respect him. It feels like a drawn out version of the end of QoA, with an added outsiders’ perspective. I think it’s necessary for the series (we do have to see how Gen gets his country’s loyalty), and it’s a lot of fun as a character study, but overall it’s just not as...large? It also feels more like a series of scenes than a novel, with every scene trying to outdo the last. Look, here’s Gen ATTACKED BY ASSASSINS. NOW HE’S MAKING OUT WITH THE QUEEN. But wait, wait, HE’S REVEALING SEJANUS’ TREASON! HE’S CONFRONTING RELIUS! But wait there’s more WE’RE SAVING TELEUS FROM CERTAIN DOOM. NOW WE’RE WALL CLIMBING! MY LIFE HAS BEEN SAVED BY THE GODS!

I love all these scenes but they come VERY close together. QoA has a better sense of pacing and rhythm.

QoA also feels more unpredictable. It has better twists. It has plot twists that threw me for a loop the first time round because you can see how they are set up but they still feel like they come out of nowhere. Whereas KoA has plot twists that come out of nowhere because you have no fucking clue what’s going on. Better written? I don’t see where you’re getting that.

It’s also easier to get emotionally invested in QoA. I’m going to be brutally honest here and upset half the fandom: I don’t care about Costis. He’s nice. But I don’t care about him. And do I care about Baron Erondites’ sons? Do I care about this random girl named Heiro who appears in like two scenes? Not really, no. I mean, Megan Whalen Turner MAKES me care about them, and now that I’ve read KoA I could discuss them for hours, but fundamentally I care about Irene and Eugenides a lot more than them (or than Sophos, which knocks out Conspiracy of Kings, another excellent novel). Now, KoA also does a great job with Teleus and Relius, which is great, and it did make me ultimately invest myself in Costis and Dite and Sejanus and whoever. But like. We also meet like five hundred other characters who only get a very base level of characterization because we just don’t have time. And that’s good, in that it sets up some fun and complex political intrigue. But when I’m trying to balance five different barons, eighteen attendants and six thousand other people, it’s hard for me to care about any of them individually. Oh, and btw, you know how KoA shows Gen from an outside perspective that gradually grows more sympathetic and shows him as both legendary and human? Completely fails to do that for Irene. Only QoA, so far, manages to give her that depth-though I haven’t read Thick As Thieves yet.

But moving on. I’m gonna stop dissing KoA and go back to praising QoA now. Sorry, KoA. But...you got some problems.

QoA’s portrayal of Eugenides going through a hard time and eventually getting through it is emotionally wearing and TOUGH. It’s the one book of the series where the protagonist really GOES THROUGH HELL, to the extent that when you come to the scene where he steals the magus, you feel the strongest catharsis of possibly any point in the series. And even then it’s not over-the aftermath of him losing his hand and Irene’s cruelty to him continues and has lasting effects on the series. This is the book that really shapes Eugenides out of the rough material of The Thief’s Gen. Without QoA, Eugenides is just a clever and determined trickster. Sure, he’s kind as well, and he has his own weaknesses. But QoA forces a level of pain, suffering and growth on him that none of the other books can match. It’s his personal crucible.

Also, just saying. The two best scenes of this entire fucking series are probably the proposal scene and the scene where Gen’s hand gets cut off. Megan Whalen Turner has been trying ever since (look, Sophos has a gun! GEN CAN STEAL SWORDS FROM ASSASSINS) but she hasn’t yet topped them. They’re too good. The scene where Gen’s hand gets cut off is just viscerally cruel and shocking, and it’s the first time we see Gen lose. It will never affect us that much again. And the proposal scene...well, it’s a bit more personal but I really really love Gen and Irene together and I absolutely did not expect it to happen. And I think it was that way for everyone.

So yeah. I could probably come up with about fifty other reasons it’s The Best, but basically I have a lot of love for it and I do actually think it is a better book. What do you think about it? I gather you have a love for it as well.