even outside of just being a REALLY fun sandbox to play in, the elaborate worldbuilding in the goblin emperor is such a clever way of ensuring character-reader bonding. even though maia is lovely and you'd probably love him anyway, between all the michen'muras and dach'osminnoi and the untheileians and thees and thous and all the c names you can't remember, you feel just as lost and bewildered as he does, and you really get a sense of the immense scale of this burden he's been handed. so you empathise extra hard with every panicked and inept moment maia has, because god damn it you're confused and feeling a bit stupid too. you both start as outsiders to the world, but as you get through the book you slowly learn with him, and get more confident with him, and you're proud of yourself! and you're proud of him! and because you're in his isolated third-person pov the whole time, it's like you've done it together! and you root for him so damn hard because you've put the work in, and so has he, and you want to see it pay off. it's so preposterously effective
I have been reflecting on this and I think this is also why the objectively absolutely bizarre choice to have the main mystery solved off screen, by a character who up and disappears halfway through the book, and then explains himself right at the end in what is essentially a Greek Tragedy Messenger Speech actually works.
That really is the experience Maia is having. He is stuck at court, he can do basically nothing directly. He is stuck asking other people to do things and then hoping they do it. And in Celehar's case specifically, he's stuck trusting a very erratic expert to do a job he doesn't actually understand especially well.
