songbird

wow this sucks so bad we ought [remembers that thou mustn't abidicate, as thy cousin Idra would be dead within the year] bridge the Istandaärtha

Maia and Csethiro Goblinemperor are kinda the funniest pairing in the world... pious non-confrontational man who accidentally became emperor and would LOVE to just go and be a monk or something, put in an arranged marriage with an academic-jock swordswoman whose life dream is to get to say really loudly WHAT SIR, DO YOU QUARRELL?? I DEMAND SATISFACTION and then fight a duel about it. Initially she was pissed about the arranged marriage but now she keeps offering to kill people for him. Like when cats bring you things they hunted. It's like. Maia, thinking tentatively it would be nice to have a wife who doesn't hate him, while Csethiro is in the background overflowing a teacup because she got distracted by the third narrative arc of her maladaptive daydream where she's Lancelot and Maia's Guinevere. Maia probably gets jumpscared awake in the middle of the night w her face like an inch from his and before he can panic she's like 'on a scale of one to ten how impressed wouldst thou be if I crossed a bridge made out of swords to rescue thee and there were also lions at the end' and Maia is like '????? ten?? is that a thing that happens????'

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

Wish they’d invent a way to implode your life without having to actually… implode your life

I'm seriously just truly bewildered and delighted by the design and depth of the Queen's Thief series. Political intrigue, sparse and poignant prose, characters who are so clearly their own and their ROMANCE agh.