#the complexities of irene and eugenides relationship

[bellaroles]

Guess I wasn't ready for these books back then. I didn't understand the subtleties, the nuances, the jokes, the elaborate plans, the misdirections. It took more than ten years later to read them in my 30s to really appreciate them.

[apprendere]

While Ao3 is down, I'd like to recommend a series that can occupy your need for blorbos

First, the Queens Thief books. And if you've already read them, go reread them again. I'm putting in holds at my library when I finish this post. We've got a charming rogue, divine intervention?, a spare hand, complex relationships that include devotion and loyalty and fidelity and fealty and love, and for some more Ao3 style tags, enemies to lovers, Eugenides deserves a hug, BAMF Attolia Irene, politics, multiple POV, unreliable narrator, self aware unreliable narrator, Pheris deserves a hug, Pheris also got people killed,

It is a completed six book series with so much reread-ability. So much. Every time you read a new book you can go back and reread the ones you've already read and it's like reading a new story because of the new context and knowledge you have of different characters

Also the spare hand I mentioned? Taken by one of the main characters' love interests

Feel free to add on book recs in reblogs, we can direct some fandom to libraries while Ao3 is down

[fuckyeahqueensthief]

It seems like you tend to tag all posts mentioning two characters as “ship: character x character” and while I get that that’s probably a way to cover your bases for ships where people both do and don’t ship them (like Eugenides/Costis for example), I think you should reconsider that as a system. Sometimes it’s pretty clear the OP doesn’t intend it to be romantic (a recent “Phresine/Irene” post) and sometimes it’s actually a bit creepy, like that post tagged Pheris/Eugenides even though the post describes their relationship as FATHERLY and Pheris’s age has been estimated as young as 9 by some readers.

Okay tbh I was debating making a post about this exact issue bc of Pheris’ age but decided against it bc I thought I was being over dramatic but since someone else brought it up, clearly it’s something I should address.

The thing is, there’s really exactly zero way to fix this problem in a way that doesn’t cause other problems. If I start tagging things meant platonically as something besides character x character, it gets really into policing people’s reading of the text and I’m not about to do that. I mean think about it - I personally read Costis/Gen as romantic so I tag it as such but the person who posted doesn’t like that. So do I retag it as a platonic ship despite the fact that I and several others have even written meta going into how romantic the relationship is or do I go by the poster’s also valid feelings? Do I disregard the clear romantic connotations in Costis/Kamet and the ways in which gay characters are often forced to be subtext only in children’s media just because they don’t kiss on page?

There’s also the issue of making the tagging system much more complex. If I start adding in secondary tags for platonic, it turns the Gen/Costis tag into two different tags. It means someone looks at irene x helen and goes “hey I want more irene and other people” and then finds there’s nothing in “irene x relius” and “phresine x irene” and assumes there’s no content. And I have a hard enough time keeping up with the sheer number of tags on the posts already because typing is very difficult for me bc I am disabled. Adding one more tag on top of that is a lot.

And then, there’s the fact that while the “x” and “ship” does seem to indicate romance, the x on this blog has not signified that for a very long time. Like you said, I have phresine x irene stuff on here. I’ve got the magus x Sophos, another relationship with a very big age gap and a fatherly relationship in the same vein as Gen and Pheris. I’ve got MoW x Gen, which is an actual father/son relationship. I’ve got Gen x Helen, who are cousins. And on and on.

I definitely get why people are uncomfortable if I tag something “Eugenides x Pheris” or as a ship but there’s plenty of “ship: magus x sophos” on here and it’s the same idea. It just means “this post is about the relationship between these two” and that’s it. I’m perfectly happy putting that in the pinned post so people know it’s not meant to be read as solely romantic. But I don’t want to change it bc it’s going to cause a lot of problems for me as the person who tags stuff, and potentially drama around why I tag certain things.

TLDR I get the pushback against it but there’s not a real solution and typing is very hard for me most of the time, adding another tag would just not be feasible.

[bookandcover]

The long-awaited sixth and final installment of the Queen’s Thief series! I asked for this book for my birthday back in October (said it was the one thing I truly wanted) and then I read it at breakneck pace in the two or three days that followed. I waited until now to write about it (tragically lame) and, in the meantime, loaned my copy to my sister…my writing about this awesome book leaves something to be desired. I’ll probably re-read the whole thing sometime this year.

As in books 3-5 of this series, The Return of the Thief shows us Eugenides through the eyes of someone else, although this book follows, more closely than books 4 and 5, the events that have Eugenides at their heart (like the lynchpin that he is, peace-keeper on the Lesser Peninsula, but also the centroid of the mechanism, controlling the events around him as these weave intricate patterns). Our young narrator is Pheris, of the house Erondites, heir of the most troublesome of Attolia’s barons. But no love is lost between Pheris and his family, as the young boy’s physical disabilities make him an embarrassment to them. Like Eugenides himself, Pheris leans into the things that make him underestimated by others, and, in doing so, he observes a lot, but is suspected of nothing. When he’s sent to the palace by his grandfather, to serve like many young heirs as an attendant to the king, his physical (and assumed mental) disabilities are intended to be seen as a direct insult to Eugenides.

Pheris’s role as king’s attendant places him in close proximity to Eugenides, allowing a narration of plot from eyes that are nearby, but that do not see everything. This narrative viewpoint relies, as so much of this series as a whole does, on the incorrect assumptions that other characters make about Eugenides—often to those very characters’ downfalls. The reader is, of course, no longer fooled; we know Eugenides’s omniscience. And, early in this book, I worried this trope of dramatic irony was used and worn. I couldn’t imagine a better foil character for Eugenides than Costis, who is his straightforwardness and courageous foolhardiness, is the perfect complement to Gen. When Gen jokingly says “jump,” Costis doesn’t even stop to ask “how far?” Their dynamic is beautiful and, often, comedic. Attolia as counter-point to Eugenides provides another unparalleled character dynamic, vastly different than the one between wily Gen and earnest Costis, as Attolia’s set of strategic moves—more serious and calculated, more “textbook” than her husband’s—complement Eugenides’s at turn-after-turn. The irony, for Attolia and Eugendies, exists between. We, as the readers, are somehow left out of their cosmic inside joke, only glimpsing it here and there, while we laugh repeatedly at Costis’s expense.

Where would Pheris land on this spectrum? Was there another counter-point to Eugenides that could show him more fully than these other characters had already done? I was pleased to realize that the Eugenides that Pheris drew forth was the one twisted with insecurities, the one fighting a real battle between himself and his god who holds him up, but who also—as Gen knows so well—will one day let him fall. In placing a character near to Eugenides whom Eugenides does not need to perform for, someone who he must see himself in, we see Gen at his most vulnerable. There is more about Gen that the reader needs to see and to understand. While we, too, once underestimated Gen (along with Attolia, along with Costis), Turner reverses this on us and shows us that we also must not overestimate him. Here is Gen the man, the mortal—in the clutches of a wild destiny, but still fallible and human.

Pheris realizes these things in his own way and on his own time. His loyalty to Eugenides isn’t easily won, which is true, too, of Attolia, of Costis. But it takes a different thing for each of these characters to turn themselves to pivot around Eugenides, to believe in him, to see him for who he truly is.

For Attolia, this took mutual love, a love that is still being spun out and examined in this final novel, entirely within Eugenides’s insecurities. Eugenides, we see here, questions Attolia’s love for him repeatedly, not out of doubt of her, but out of doubt of his god. Does his wife love him, against her will, because this is what he asked for? This is the place where the novel ends, in the poignant Epilogue that answers Gen’s questions about Irene’s love. I understood, from this final book, that Eugenides never questions his love for Irene. When he is sickened by their history, by his loss of his hand at hers, this is not fear nor doubt of his own love, which I think might be the first interpretation a reader, or observer, would have of his actions. Instead, Gen wonders and worries over how she can love him. He did not doubt her hatred at a point in time in their pasts. How can he reconcile those memories with her love now, if not through the intervention of the god that he sees make the impossible possible in his life? Attolia, somehow, understands Gen and is changed deeply, irrevocably by her understanding. Attolia seems like someone who, without the well-fit complement to herself who is Gen, might never have loved or considered a partnership, contented in herself as she was. She is never lessened by Gen, to the contrary. She tries repeatedly to build him up, to force his hand, to yield power to him, to make him openly show himself as the king she knows him to be. The strength of her conviction in him is always stronger that his own. She does not question herself, either; firm and objective where Eugenides flows, malleable, changeable, and moody.

We do see Eugenides try out certain kinds of power, and face Attolia’s correction, in this sixth book. One of the most startling parts of the novel was Eugenides’s attempts to convince Attolia to stay behind from the battlefront when she is pregnant (because, why, I wondered, did he even try), but this shows he has but little of his normal strategic restraint when it comes to his feelings about his wife. I adored the scene where he nearly kills Attolia’s lame suitor with a knife thrown just moments too late, which, like his attempts to keep Attolia from riding into battle, seems theatrical in nature, like a play staged for the benefit of their onlooking kingdom (how telling that we see the festival plays that satirize Eugenides as the one-handed king, and, whole the king behaves like he’s offended, but we all know he loves a good drama). The truest, realest moments of Gen and Irene are hidden from the eyes of everyone. Pheris, only by chance, gets the smallest glimpse: the two with couches pushed together, asleep in each others’ arms after Eugenides altercation Attolia’s suitor. Attolia did not bend to Eugenides, but she is reshaped by him. She, too, although she did not know it and did not long for it, was lonely for love, as we’re shown in the Epilogue where we return to the scene where Gen first saw her dancing alone in the gardens. It was not the will of the god that changed her, but only the slightest nudge of the circumstances—so that a boy saw a girl, who was lonely, but also strong, and rebuilt his life around trying to be with her. Eugenides weaves the strings of fate, yes, but how can we possibly fault him the end goal? Becoming king is the irksome side effect of being married to the woman he’s always wanted.

For Costis to orbit around Eugenides took the dismantling of his settled, square worldview. Like Attolia, he is changed. Like Attolia, this change is organic. We’ve never seen Eugenides browbeat someone into submission. Even his enemies are brought low through their own failures. This doesn’t, of course, mean that Eugenides takes his victories with grace; he wouldn’t be Gen without that horrible self-satisfaction, stubbornness, and studied laziness. Costis valued a certain kind of strength. He needed to see Eugenides was capable of this kind of strength, and in seeing this—at the end of book 3—he truly understood the choice Eugenides makes to prioritize other types of strength. That other men’s brand of pride is worth nothing. That saving face is worth nothing. That traditional masculinity is worth nothing. That winning is worth very, very little. Especially, when, on the other side of the scale is the safety of someone you love. Is yourself that need to live with forever. Is information that could make the difference, all the difference in the world.

We see Costis who has been reshaped by Eugenides in book 5 of the series. He is a more cautious speaker and thinker, willing to plan many steps ahead, willing to hide more of himself. But he is still righteous, still blundering, still a country boy, and an excellent counterpoint to refined Kamet who is very ready to underestimate someone with these characteristics, giving Costis is own type of Eugenides energy. I left book 5 feeling somewhat dissatisfied, longing for more emotional unpacking between Costis and Kamet. I was sad that these two were only side characters in book 6, but we got tidbits and hints at the blossoming love between them (I mean, who moves to live alone in the country with someone unless they are rustic lovers?!) Through Relius and Teleus’s characters (two stoic figures who have a complex emotional undercurrent to their relationship) we get another look at queer love in the world of the Queen’s Thief. There’s also a subtle nod to the support, care, and affinity among a queer community in Attolia when Kamet dances with Relius, while Costis dances with his sister, at the celebration at the very end of the book. Pheris also bonds closely with Relius and I wondered if Pheris’s character is perhaps asexual (he’s adamant that he doesn’t think he’ll ever fall in love). These characters’ identities are complex, and never simplified, and there seems to be a resistance on the author’s part to spelling out their sexualities and romantic entanglements exactly. But this is not unlike the primary heterosexual relationship at the heart of the series: the most intimate moments take place “off stage,” and we, the readers, see mostly the waves of impact made by their love and commitment and by their nuanced understandings of each other.

For Pheris to see Eugenides and to be changed by him takes Eugenides’s vulnerability, in combination with Pheris seeing and understanding the hand of his god on the king. Pheris lives in his own circle of misery (afraid of the treatment of his family even within the palace, a legitimate fear we know after Juridius threatens him), one that Eugenides reaches into in a way that might surprise someone who did not know Gen’s brand of kingship well. When Pheris falls ill and is feverish, he has fragmented memories of the king at his side, caring for him in the middle of the night. Pheris also see Eugenides sick and debilitated repeatedly. In one of the most intense sections of the book, Pheris sees Eugenides fully operating under the hand of his god when the king is captured by the Medes when the two camps are staked out on the plains of battle. Pheris follows the king into the Medes’s camp receiving little resistance from others. He hides in the king’s place as the king goes on a mysterious killing spree, removing the leadership of their enemies. As the two escape the camp, Pheris sees in Eugenides a harsh energy that is inhuman, as inhuman as the lightness he exhibits in a game of chase—where he jumps from balconies and leaps for hanging chandeliers—throughout his own palace.

Early on during his time in the palace, Pheris too sees a god appear before Eugenides and guide him back onto the path planned for him: in this case, that path is to keep Pheris at his side and not send him back home, as Eugenides wished to do after learning of Pheris passing information (albeit against his will) to Juridius. Eugenides, Pheris sees, is often upset and bitter about this intervention of the gods, especially as the gods’ give instructions he cannot wish to follow, yet he understands, utterly, the power of the gods. From this, Pheris does not learn to obey Eugenides above all else. He still frees his traitorous uncle Sejanus from right under Eugenides’s nose and helps him escape from the united Lesser Peninsula army’s camp. This is an instinctual choice that pays off, as Sejanus later warns the gathered Attolian-Eddisian-Sounissian army about a pass where a smaller section of the Mede Army is trying to invade the Lesser Peninsula and catch the defending army in a pincher move. With Sejanus’s warning, a small band of Attolians and Eddisians, led by Eugenides, cut the Medes off at the pass, nearly with disastrous consequences. The ways in which Pheris shows his commitment to Eugenides, such as blindly following him into the Mede camp with no concern for himself, but still operating independently from him, particularly in his interactions with Sejanus, set up Pheris as a complex figure in Eugenides’s world, one ultimately guided by his own inner compass and worldview, in much the way Eugenides himself is.

This book epically culminates the series, drawing the plot lines of Attolia, Eddis, and Sounis together in one novel, as the countries unite under Eugenides—to whom the other nations swear fidelity—to drive the Mede Empire back and maintain their freedom and independence. With Attolia’s successful pregnancy after a few miscarriages, and the birth of an heir who can continue the unified governance of the Lesser Peninsula, we end this novel on a note of pure celebration, both human and god-blessed, as the characters take to the rooftops to dance, granted Eugenides’s smooth confidence as he dances with a god who has not let him fall.

[attackfish]

Queen's Thief Appreciation Week 2018 Compendium

Day One (April 8): the moment you fell in love with the series

The first time I read the series was when I was twelve. I checked The Thief and the Queen of Attolia, then the only two books that had been released, out of my school library and then promptly got sick with a nasty fever and was stuck in bed for a week and a half. During that time, after I recovered enough to read, but before I had the energy to get up and switch out books, I read them both cover to cover five times. I have been in love with them ever since.

Twelve is kind of an odd age to fall in love with these two books, Queen more than Thief, and my own budding political scientist inclinations probably had a lot to do with that. There wasn't a lot of political procedural fiction I had access to at the time after all, and this was the same year I made my science fair project about ballots. But I also was a deeply depressed disabled kid who didn't have many cool, complex disabled heroes, especially in the fantasy genre, and none who were allowed to doubt themselves and fear that they really were useless, or to feel a sense of imprisonment. Also important for me was seeing Gen triumphing through skill and wit both before and after acquiring his disability, and the sense with Gen that his disability wasn't so much overcome as worked around.

Day Two (April 9): Favorite Book

This almost feels like an unfair question, because all of the books are so magnificent. And I'm going to be unfair in my answer.

My favorite book of the series to read is The Thief. I grew up in Southern California and the mountain west, and the landscape the characters travel through in The Thief reminds me so much of home. And more than that, the framing device of the novel, that Gen recorded his story after it took place but before the events of The Queen of Attolia, gives the entire story a dramatic irony that balances out whatever the opposite of dramatic irony is that colors the first read through of the book. There's this feeling of "Oh Gen, you have no idea what's coming for you," that feels like payback after the secrets Gen keeps throughout this book. Though of course the framing device means Gen would have been assuming most readers already knew who he was.

The book I am most in awe of is The King of Attolia. It is so intricate. There are so many plots within plots, and every time I read it I pick up on new ones. And yet, it's still so compelling as a character drama, and it's a masterclass of political procedural writing, and just wow.

The book that affected me the most is The Queen of Attolia. It affected me not only as a disabled reader, but as a disabled writer, giving me the idea that the hero of a fantasy novel could have a disability without some kind of superpower that negated his disability. It is also the one that I find stylistically creeping into my own writing and my own character development.

Day Three (April 10): Favorite Character

My favorite characters, plural, are Gen and Irene.

My love for Gen was born when I first read The Thief when I was twelve. He sparkled. He jumped off the page, clever and funny, and I delighted in his ability to overcome seemingly any obstacle. And then I read The Queen of Attolia, and once again, he was able to triumph, but this time he did so with a disability. And there was nothing trite about his overcoming disability. He was allowed to be depressed and self-loathing and to rediscover his strength in a way that felt real to me, a depressed, disabled child, and I love Gen all the more for his personal and emotional relationship to his injury and disability.

Irene for me fits a type of character I am pretty much guaranteed to love in any piece of media. She is deeply emotional and also highly controlled, keeping those emotions hidden. She is often underestimated, and she understands this and uses this to her advantage. She has honed her mask of imperviousness through hardship and danger, knowing that the emotions she shows can be weilded as weapons against her. And her mask both protects and imprisons her. She is smart, she is careful, she is afraid, and she loves deeply. And when she acts, she acts decisively. This is Irene. It's also Mai, and Alicia Florrick, and Kalinda Sharma, and Ursa, Asami, and pretty much my favorite character in any series she appears in. Shut up. I have a type. And Irene is a wonderfully compelling version of this type.

Day Four (April 11): Favorite Ship:

Given my two favorite characters, this is probably obvious, but Gen/Irene is my favorite ship. It's a really... messed up ship, to be honest. They are both messed up people, and they both have trauma issues related to each other, especially Gen. Irene cut his hand off after having him tortured. Yeah this is a pretty messed up and horrible ship, and yet the way they both seem compelled by something beyond themselves to love each other. and the way they both struggle to cope with the terrible memories the other engenders within them is fascinating.

Day Five (April 12): Favorite Location

The landscape between the palace of Sounis and the temple of Hamiathes’s Gift is unequivocally my favorite setting(s) in this series. Again, this is because they remind me so much of growing up in Southern California and because I can picture them so clearly.

Day Six (April 13): Favorite Line/Moment

So many of the best moments in the Queen's Thief series are only recognizable in retrospect. Megan Whalen Turner is a master of setup and payoff. So I want to talk about two moments that are an example of this. In The Thief, after the Magus tells the story of the creation of the earth and the birth of the Gods, he and Gen have a conversation:

“You sound very learned, Gen. What do you know about it?” asked the magus.

I sat up and moved to the fire before I answered him. “My mother was from the mountain country. It’s no different there. Everybody goes to the temple, and everybody likes to hear the old stories after dinner, but that doesn’t mean they expect a god to show up at their door.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” I said, letting my tongue run away from me. “And you made a lot of mistakes. You aren’t even pronouncing the name of the country right. The people on the mountains call it Eeddis, not Eddis. And you left out the part where the Earth cries when the Sky God ignores her and turns the oceans to salt.”

“I did?”

“Yes, I told you, my mother told me the stories when I was little. I know them all, and I know that they call the country Eeddis.”

“As for that, Gen, I can tell you that Eeddis is the old pronunciation used before the invaders came. We’ve changed the pronunciation of many of our words since the time of the invaders, while Eddisian pronunciations haven’t altered for centuries. Eddis is pronounced differently now, whatever the people of that country say.”

“It’s their country,” I grumbled. “They ought to know the right name for it.”

“It isn’t that Eeddis is the wrong name, Gen. It’s just an old way of saying the same word. The rest of the civilized world has moved on. Tell me what other mistakes I made.”

I told him as many as I’d noticed. Most of the mistakes were bits of the story that he had left out.

When I was done, he said, “It’s always interesting to hear different versions of people’s folktales, Gen, but you shouldn’t think that your mother’s stories are true to the original ones. I’ve studied them for many years and am sure that I have the most accurate versions. It often happens that emigrants like your mother can’t remember parts of the original, so they make things up and then forget that the story was ever different. Many of these myths were created by great storytellers centuries ago, and it is inevitable that in the hands of common people they get debased.”

“My mother never debased anything in her entire life,” I said hotly.

“Oh, don’t be offended,” the magus said. “I’m sure she never meant to, but your mother wasn’t educated. Uneducated people rarely know much about the things they talk about every day. She probably never even knew that your name, Gen, comes from the longer name Eugenides.”

“She did, too,” I insisted. “You’re the one that doesn’t know anything. You never knew my mother, and you don’t know anything about her.”

This scene pays off in so many ways, Gen's changing relationship with the Gods of his people, the revelation of Gen's heritage and his (and his mother's) not at all common roots, all of which happen within The Thief. If we push that scene just a little forward, The Magus taunts Gen with the, he believes, unlikely prospect that because of his name, Gen might be related to the thieves of Eddis, which pays off handsomely when the Magus finds out who precisely Gen is.

But there's also a scene in The Queen of Attolia where Gen gets the Magus back for his insult here that I love. In this scene, Gen, who has captured the Magus and imprisoned him in a comfortable country retreat in Eddis, goes with his queen to retrieve him. On the way back with the Magus, Helen tells the story of Hespira, and afterwards the three discuss the tale:

The magus was quiet when the story was done. He looked at Eddis with new admiration. She sat cross- legged with the open packages of food around her, quite comfortable but then a little embarrassed by his regard. “And Hespira’s mother?” the magus asked finally. “Did she miss her daughter?”

“Oh, she grew used to the idea,” said Eddis. “Mothers must.”

“Alternatively, she lost her mind and wandered the caves of the mountain, endlessly calling for her daughter, and that’s what the miners hear,” said Eugenides without opening his eyes.

“There are a number of different ways to tell the story,” Eddis admitted.

“I didn’t realize that so much of the teller could be invested in the stories,” the magus said. He was used to the dry records of scholarship without the voice of the storyteller shaping and changing the words to suit an audience and a particular view of the world. He’d heard Eugenides tell his stories, but hadn’t realized the Thief’s interpretations were more than a personal aberration.

“Go on,” said Eugenides with a smile, his eyes still closed. “Tell my queen she’s debasing the old myths created by superior storytellers centuries ago.”

I love this moment. Gen is a scholar and has already forced the Magus to acknowledge him as such. But his relationship to these stories is not as a scholar, and it's not really as a religious devotee (after all he still doesn't believe the stories, in spite of his knowledge of the existence of the Gods themselves.) It's as a member of the oral tradition in which those stories are still being told and still evolving. He understands those stories as part of a living culture, his culture. It's this understanding, not his scholarly understanding, that the Magus dismisses in The Thief, and it's this understanding that he forces the Magus to acknowledge the value of here. I love it.

Day Seven (April 14): Free For All

In Thick as Thieves, Kamet gives us a wonderful glimpse back to a young Gen, the Gen of The Thief, or just after, when he was spying on Attolia for his queen and to satisfy his own fascination with her. I love this glimpse, and I love how much enjoyment Gen seemed to take in playing his parts. I miss that Gen, while at the same time am fascinated with who Gen is becoming, and I think part of the reason I miss that Gen so much is because it's implied that Gen misses that version of himself too and regrets the need to leave it behind.

[queensandkingsofattolia]

Favorite Object

The Queen’s Thief Appreciation Week: Day Four

“What is your favorite object?”

Earrings. More specifically, THEE earrings. I even wore one of my replica pairs today in honor of the day!

To me, they’re an excellent representation of the relationship between Attolia Irene and Eugenides. A complex secret of which the exact details are only known to the two of them. 

Also, the fact that earrings in general are Gen’s favorite item to steal and the fact that he FREELY GAVE them to Irene, it’s really symbolic I feel. It’s kind of the equivalent of a cat dropping dead birds at the feet of its favorite human as a gift. 

These specific earrings are just so perfect and I just really really love them and am being really bad at putting it into words...

[fuckyeahqueensthief]

@toushindai

Dite gets to the continent after spending his entire voyage composing a stirring song about his relationship with Irene and Eugenides and his complex love for them called “the house in Attolia” except he gets to the continent and finds there’s two separate songs ALREADY NAMED THAT

Sorry the house of rising sun post was obviously supposed to go to my personal blog not here 😞😞