See, you present that as a Stone Cold Haha Funney Exaggerated Take Nobody Could Possibly Believe, and I wish you were right.

I mean, he’s a masked monster/dark prince who needs to crawl over the broken glass of everything he’s ever done in order to be worthy to kiss the feet of the woman he loves. 

she ultimately resists his call to moral ruin and fights the darkness inside her on her own terms, refusing him over and over again until he carves away the cancerous pieces of his brutality and becomes what she ultimately desires. and then he dies for her.

we were mostly discussing the culture of violence! Makt is such an interesting country, but when you think about it, you only really know a couple of things about it. it’s in a dying world, the line of succession is apparently dictated by no other clause than simply who can kill the previous monarch, and everyone is really, really violent. to the extent where roving bands of people will quite literally tear people apart to eat them alive if they smell magic. like, yikes. pretty brutal place.

compared to Arnes, it’s kind of undeveloped. of course, Arnes is the main setting and the home of the main character, so it makes sense that it’ll have a little more detail, and obviously England is just real-life England, so everyone is kind of on board with that. however, even with that in mind, there’s still precious little about Makt, which is kind of wild, because it is very important to the plot -- especially in subsequent books, where it’s even more of a setting and you get some perspective into what living there is like through Holland.

we were discussing how jarring this could be -- Requin brought up that it was very strange to read the scene where Holland is walking home from the market after buying some bread and wine for the night, and how odd that is based against the only other context of the world that we have. Makt is set up to be this place where you shouldn’t go out after dark else you’ll probably be murdered, and where your magic can be sensed immediately and you’ll have to fight off gangs of people after your blood. but then Holland is walking down the street in the open, with some bread. a little weird! was it slightly better than, and got exponentially worse under the rule of the Danes? this is a possibility -- the Danes rule with the help of the stone from Black London, which is highly corrupted and could theoretically be increasing the speed with which the world decays, thus creating more unrest and desperation in Makt. but of course, none of this is explicitly said. we’re just told Makt Bad, and then told But Sometimes You Can Buy Bread And Be Fine Even If You’re Antari, and you kind of have to close the gaps yourself. is this the fault of an oversight? underdevelopment? hard to say.

Makt is also severely underpopulated. now, it’s canon that it has a low population, but even so, there’s only a handful of characters and even less of them are developed in any way. even characters relevant to the plot, like Ojka, are kind of outlines of themselves, their background populated entirely by “grew up in Makt and it was nasty”. even the Danes aren’t much more than “nasty and sadistic”. as for general setting, if there’s a marketplace, as there is, surely there would be more people around? more opportunity for the background noise that’s present in Arnes and England? despite its increasing inclusion in the book, Makt still remains a sketchy outline. is this simply because Kell tries not to spend too much time there and doesn’t wander? or is it because there really is nothing more to Makt than a nasty, violent world? and if that’s the case, why does Holland love it so much? there has to be something about it that he loves enough to do all he did for it, and to spend his life dreaming of better. where’s the Makt that Holland knows?

This is my body, when sweet touches momentarily overwhelmed the gloom in his mind; this is my body, when he offered himself to someone whose lost eyes made his heart ache; this is my body, when he started to forget that it really was still his.

“Come hell, high water, or my parents” is such a good phrase I may borrow it. Good luck with everything!! I am glad you are doing what you need to take care of yourself

couldn’t listen all the way through | not my thing | it’s okay | kinda catchy | ok i really like this | downloading immediately | already in my library

This was really a religious experience