#book meta

Competition for Top Harlot of Eyam is pretty fierce! The Harlot of the Tower is not winning this one, given that her number in LLE is 1 or 0 depending on how you count it. The Golden Cobra, given the threesomes, may well be coming out ahead. Octavian, could be pretty high but unlikely to add to the number. Key of the Cauldron, immoral people pleaser who offered to go down on his boss pretty quickly after meeting her, should be considered in this race also…

But yes indeed Lia is a sexy dark horse, and the fact she ends book 1 with a bird in the hand, as it were, as opposed to everyone else losing their heads or involved in messy betrothals, should give her extra points. The perception of Lia as a pure maiden clashing with the reality of her as actively sexual is something I wanted to explore in Long Live Evil, and go deeper with in All Hail Chaos. Because when you’re sexually active, you have a sexual past…

Which also lets me explore the queer subculture of Themesvar, both regarding the discreet indiscretions of the king’s court, and the Cauldron. The Cauldron is specifically not just a low-income part of the city but a hotbed of criminals because it is a liberty, an area of the city which is not policed and where laws are not enforced. Liberties were real things. I live in an area called ‘the Liberties’ in Dublin city. (The laws have changed and I will be arrested for pick-pocketing someone, but first they must catch me!)

Consider pirates, who had a form of gay marriage - when you go against society in one way, it’s easier to break with social mores in a variety of ways. It’s no accident that there’s a bar in the Cauldron where not only is Marius propositioned by a sex worker but Marius is presumed to be a sex worker in a specific kinky costume and him being on the hunt for a wealthy male libertine is received with an attitude of ‘I’m sure, good luck with that!’ Key’s father also forbids Key to go to that same tavern - and Key is a child assassin who grew up in the Cauldron. Life is a rich tapestry, etc. (Possibly Key’s dad lived in daily fear Key would get bright ideas along those lines. Pour one out for Key’s frazzled papa.)

More under the cut musing about the sexual mores of Eyam, though not about Google Maps even a little bit… sorry to Google Maps and you all, I got carried away… this is how I deal with book release nerves I guess, thank you for your kindness and excitement!

HOW I FEEL TRYING to remind people that lucy gray wasn't the only one to haunt narrative, but sejanus as well. I'm sure every time Snow saw a mockingjay or jabberjay, he would think of Sejanus, too, the moment that he pressed the button record and the moment he chose power over love and compassion.

District 2 itself was haunted by Sejanus. Snow made it lose all the compassion it ever carried because he would see that boy on the playground among the people. District 2 produces some of the most vicious and cruel tributes we have ever seen. Most of them volunteer to enter the Games. Take Enobaria, who volunteered TWICE, like the games were just a sporting tournament, killed someone by ripping out their throat with her bare teeth, then went and had her teeth modified like an animal, like a monster. Oh? Did that sound familiar to you? “You're monsters! All of you!" I wonder who said that. Who had more compassion, more humanity than all of the Capitol combined? District 2 was the last to join the rebellion. They supplied the Capitol with weapons actively, until they were beaten and surrendered. You cannot tell me that vile man didn’t do it on purpose. Because he couldn’t stand the hope Sejanus had. He couldn’t stand the compassion Sejanus held for his people. So what did he do? He twisted the one thing Sejanus loved - his District - into everything he hated. My poor boy would be rolling in his grave right now.

And I'm sure Snow saw much of Sejanus (and Lucy Gray) in Lenore Dove and Haymitch, which he ruined with gumdrops…. is it a coincidence that when Snow first met 8-year-old Sejanus, he clutched a bag of gumdrops? That a young girl who quietly rebelled was taken away by gumdrops? That he ruined a young boy who defied him multiple times, because I'm sure when he looked in Haymitch's eyes, he saw Sejanus. And Haymitch is haunted by Sejanus, as the boy who never won. The boy who failed. Haymitch failed as the Mockingjay; luck was not on his side. Just like Sejanus, who failed in his rebellion, and the only luck he felt was the quick death of a tightening rope. They both had the chance to change something for the better and failed. But, at least Sejanus never had to see the monster he once shouted about take over his 'friend'. And at least Haymitch got to see the sunrise.

Snow will forever be reminded of his 'friend', later in Peeta, who was awkward like Sejanus, but compassionate. Who never wanted to change, and spoke his thoughts out loud. Who acted when he thought something was wrong. But look at what Peeta became. Something so similar to District 2. He will see Sejanus in the rage of the mockingjay. As Katniss speaks the truth the same way Sejanus did. I also think Tigris haunts him, and may be why he pushed her away so much later on. The cousin who sacrificed so much for him became a reminder as well to what he lost. Tigris was probably the last smidge of humanity he had left.

Captive Prince makes you question your own morals.

Because no war is just. Because no victory comes without a graveyard behind it.

What happened to Damen: being sold into slavery, stripped of his identity, forced into servitude....was horrific. He was wronged. He was betrayed. He didn’t deserve it.

But being wronged doesn’t automatically make you right. He isn’t morally superior.

Because the truth is — he was the domino. He may be noble, He may be honorable , he may be loyal and He fights for his people, carries himself with pride. but he was still a soldier. Still a prince who killed. Whether he knew it or not, Damen was part of the machinery that destroyed lives.

The war might’ve been his father’s but the sword was in his hands.

You can’t justify war simply because you won. You can’t excuse destroyed lives because your cause was righteous. Victory doesn’t cleanse blood.

He didn’t abuse a child — but his kingdom’s victory made sure that child was orphaned, targeted, and left alone with a monster. His crown became the reason a 13-year-old was left defenseless.

Damen didn’t know. But ignorance doesn’t erase impact.

And when he finally does know, when he sees what his “honorable war” left behind, that’s when the story gets morally complicated. And that’s why it’s brilliant.

And Laurent?

Laurent may be cruel. He may be calculating. He may be a snake, a ruthless tactician, a dirty politician.

But you can’t say his hatred is misplaced.

He was thirteen when he lost everything. When he was orphaned, abused, and dismantled piece by piece.

You can’t call him a monster for not being a saint by the time he clawed his way to the end of that tunnel.

What kind of strength does it take to be surrounded by that much hate, to be abandoned by everyone who should have protected you and still not become the monster they made?

Laurent didn’t abandon his country, even when it abandoned him. He didn’t lose his mind, his purpose, or his moral compass, because somewhere, in the echoes of Auguste and their mother, that light stayed on.

And that tells you everything about who Laurent really is, and who his mother and brother must have been. Because even the most monstrous conditioning couldn’t wipe that out.

Captive Prince doesn’t give you clean heroes. It gives you people who were both victims and participants. It makes you sit with what it means to cause damage without meaning to, and whether redemption or absolution is possible when you’ve already taken everything from someone who deserved better.

It’s uncomfortable. And it should be.

This is a world of grey. No one is clean. And that’s the point.

PS. This post comes after many rereads. Kings Rising is my favorite of the trilogy, maybe because it finally feels two-sided, more fast-paced… or maybe just because it gives us HYN.

And honestly, that’s my eternal beef with books, movies, and shows: They give us hours, sometimes years of pain and conflict, and like two minutes of happiness at the very end. Like… didn’t I cry enough?? Give me more softness. Let me sit in the joy too.

In "The Priory of the Orange Tree", the general consensus seems to view Sabran and Aubrecht’s marriage as a tragic romance or a "bittersweet" love story—a narrative where something initially forced turned into something genuine. I’ve noticed that the general audience tends to sugarcoat structural violence simply because the man involved was "good and gentle" about it.

THE REALITY OF "STATE RAPE"

I’d like to challenge the popular idea that Sabran eventually "fell in love" with Aubrecht. I am firmly convinced that love was simply not possible under her circumstances. Sabran spent twenty-eight years saying "No." She was terrified of childbirth and resisted marriage, owning everything in her Queendom except her own body. When she finally marries Aubrecht, it isn’t a choice; it is the surrender of a cornered animal. She capitulates because the "Berethnet Mandate" is a cage she cannot escape.

Entering into a marriage where you cannot safely say "No" means that your "Yes" is void. The intimacy that follows is not romance; it is state-sanctioned rape. For those who have seen Blue Eye Samurai, consider the contrast with Mikio: he is a deeply flawed man, yet even he recognizes the hollowness of a forced union with Mizu, choosing to sleep separately rather than claim a wife who does not want him. Aubrecht, the "gentle" suitor, fails to clear even this low bar; he hurries to cash in his "marital right" on their very first night. The fact that he didn't hold a knife to her throat, but instead spoke of his hometown, doesn't change the fact that her body was conscripted for the state, and he was the one assigned to use it. He wasn't a "rapist" in the criminal sense, but he had no problem benefiting from Sabran's lack of choice.

AUBRECHT: THE BENEFICIARY, NOT THE SAVIOR

The fandom loves Aubrecht because he was "good" and clearly loved Sabran. But we must distinguish between personality and power.

By explicitly mentioning that he "ignored" the rumors about her, Aubrecht subtly reminds Sabran (and the reader) of his own "nobility." This is a form of emotional grooming; he frames himself as her only escape from isolation or political scandal. If he truly wanted to be a gentle friend, he could have supported her from afar or offered a platonic alliance. Instead, he demanded the one thing she was most desperate to protect: her body. He could have chosen a woman that knew and loved him. Instead he decided to make an expansion into a distant land and ask for the hand of a stranger. He saw a woman isolated by duty—a "prize" temporarily undervalued by the market—and he stepped into the vacuum.

He wasn't her partner; he was the company in her cell. To be precise, Sabran was born and raised in that cell; one day Aubrecht opened the gate, entered, and locked himself in with her, never once considering if his company was what Sabran actually wanted.

REFRAMING THE "DECLARATION OF LOVE"

When Sabran cries out during the siege—“Damn you, you are my companion. You have shared my bed. My flesh. My—my heart”—readers see a declaration of love. I see a desperate investor terrified of losing her only asset. Sabran bet her entire life, her body, and her autonomy on this one "horse" that is now risking a fatal shot before reaching the finish line. She paid a devastating physical and psychological price to produce an heir. If Aubrecht dies, that sacrifice risks becoming meaningless. She isn't mourning a soulmate; she is terrified of the void that opens up if her "investment" is erased.

SURVIVAL IS NOT A ROMANCE

Sabran’s "affection" for Aubrecht is a textbook survival strategy. When your body is public property, finding "fondness" for your husband is a way to stay sane. It is a coping mechanism, not a romance.

"You asked me, before I took Aubrecht to consort, if I wanted to wed. I confess now, to you alone, that I did not. And… still do not" … "Aubrecht was kind to me. Tender and good, but when he was inside me, even when I found pleasure in it, it felt — It felt is if my body where not wholly my own. It.. still feels that way now".

This confession to Ead is the most devastating moment in the book for me. It confirms that Sabran’s "pleasure" was not a bridge to love, but a symptom of her alienation. No amount of "gentleness" could manufacture a "Yes" that wasn't there to begin with. It reveals that Aubrecht was essentially making love to a ghost; he was occupying a body that Sabran had to vacate just to survive the encounter. By continuing these encounters while Sabran felt like a stranger in her own skin, he prioritized his desire for "tender connection" over the glaring absence of her agency. Consent is not just the absence of a struggle; it is the presence of the self. By Sabran's own admission, her self was never in that room.

No man's "goodness" can repair a woman's lack of bodily autonomy. By being "kind," he actually made it harder for Sabran—and the readers—to name her trauma. If he were a brute, she could righteously hate him. Because he was "gentle," she had to internalize the violation. Aubrecht never checked if she was "there." He was satisfied with a body that performed its duty. To call their relationship a "love story" is to erase the 28 years Sabran spent fighting for her own skin. It sanitizes the horror of her situation and rewards Aubrecht for simply being a "Nice Guy" while participating in the systematic stripping of a woman's sovereignty.

The "niceness" can be a tool of control just as much as "brutality" can. Let’s stop applauding the "gentle" jailer. Sabran deserved autonomy, not just a polite occupation.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CREATION AND COLONIZATION

"The kiss was hot and new and world-forming, the flare of starbirth on their lips".

When Samantha Shannon uses the phrase "world-forming," she is describing an act of cosmic agency. This is the moment Sabran stops being a historical artifact and starts being a participant in her own life.

Her contact with Aubrecht was the ultimate performance of compulsory heterosexuality—a script she read while her heart was elsewhere. Her contact with Ead is the moment she drops the script. To genuinely love someone, one must first be Whole; what Sabran was with Aubrecht was Hollow.

When a woman is assigned a husband and told her body is a vessel for a royal line, she is treated as a national utility. We need to call this by its real name: reproductive slavery. There is no middle ground where a healthy romance can grow in that soil. You cannot strip a person of their sovereignty and then expect them to "develop feelings" for the person benefiting from that theft. Romance requires the freedom to walk away; without that exit, any "affection" is merely a survival mechanism. To claim Sabran loved her consort is to suggest that a person can truly love their own chains just because the chains were wrapped in velvet. It’s an insult to the complexity of the human psyche and the reality of the trauma Sabran had to survive.

……….

There is a profound tension between Samantha Shannon’s intent—the image of a noble, tragic consort—and the structural reality of the character she actually pinned to the page. Shannon seemingly invites the reader to mourn Aubrecht as a "decent person" because he performed the role of the "Good Man" with tenderness rather than brutality. However, a character’s morality is not defined by their tone, but by their participation in power. By placing Aubrecht in a world where Sabran’s body is a state-mandated resource and Aubrecht is the one who gets a piece of that cake, Shannon created a character whose very existence is an act of encroachment. No matter how many times the author whispers that he was kind, the character’s actions speak with a much louder, more predatory resonance: he is the man who accepted the hand of a cornered stranger, who moved into the "jail" of her autonomy, and who mistook her dissociative survival for a shared life. The author may have tried to paint a tragedy of lost love, but the "pigment" of the world-building reveals a much darker portrait: the "decent man" who is perfectly comfortable benefiting from a woman's lack of choice.

……….

P.S.

More specifically about the ending of Powerless, so like SPOILERS obviously if you haven't read the book and want to read it or still hasn't finished it!

Ok so we all know the ending of Powerless was the worse in the best way possible. Like the cliffhanger was illegal, all my hopes and dreams were shattered and everything is so bad I'm still fearing and yet insanely craving Reckless.

And the last scene with Paedyn and Kai oh god! Yes we all will never recover from "Run, Paedyn. Because when I catch you, I will not miss. I will not falter. I will not make the mistake of feeling for you." (Yes I have that entire thing memorised. Why? Because I like to cause myself pain man idk)

But you know what deeply cut into my heart? The Forget-Me-Not scene at the very last page. Because Kai gave Paedyn the flower when they had poured their hearts out to each other. When they were ready to give into their feelings, into each other. And Kai gave Paedyn that flower to get her to remember who he was to her, how she felt for him.

But by the end when Paedyn, broken and bruised and crushed by everything and every truth, on the run from her home, from everything and from the man she loved who is now set on to killing her, sees that flower, she can no longer look at it with affection, she only feels pain and betrayal and loss. When she sees it she doesn't remember Kai, the boy she fell in love with, that she found so breathtakingly beautiful and bewitching, that she could not help but draw closer to despite what her reason said. Instead she remembers the Enforcer, the person who killed her father, the person who is now going to hunt her down, the person she wants revenge on for everything justlike he wantsrevenge on her.

The parallels make up so much of the storytelling in Powerless and by far this has got to be my favorite one along with the "What have you done to me?" And "This is not a goodbye, only a good way to say bye until I see you next." It's painful and heartbreaking and devastating and so just🤌🤌🤌✨️✨️✨️✨️