Empire of Gold
Sep. 21st, 2020 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Empire of Gold, S.A. Chakraborty, conclusion of the Daevabad trilogy. Posts about the previous parts here and here. Damn, this was good. If anyone was waiting to see if she could actually land this plane, very much yes. The one thing I regret is not rereading the first two - there were some callbacks to things I didn't quite remember - although I did also pick this up from the library and quail at its 750 pages, so adding another thousand+ pages of reading was not realistically in my time budget anyways.
Vaguely spoilery comments behind the cut:
I don't want to be boring by comparing this to an irrelevant unfinished series (:cough Game of Thrones cough:), but one thing I appreciated about Chakraborty's take on palace intrigue and clash of the factions was that even though she clearly loved some of her secondary characters, she didn't get distracted by them. Like, I felt it was a good balance of "everyone has a story and these very interesting people have interesting stuff going on" and keeping focus on the POV trio whose story it actually was. I also thought she did a great job of interweaving all the different conflicts - there were a lot of moving parts in the backstory but it really all came together and tied off.
And, okay, I know they're not for everyone, but I love how she handled and resolved the love triangle. Which is not to say that I don't desperately want the post-series threesome fanfic fix-it that AO3 has inexplicably not given me yet (okay, it came out in June and is 750 pages, maybe it's not that inexplicable there isn't a lot of post-trilogy fic yet), but I think this was definitely a case where a bittersweet canon had more power than something without grief. (And also I'm not even sure how else it could have ended, plausibly ... I mean, I have thoughts about how I'd do it in fic, because of course I do, and if my life ever rearranges so that writing is an option again I might even try writing some of them up, but in canon, in character? Yeah, no.)
Vaguely spoilery comments behind the cut:
I don't want to be boring by comparing this to an irrelevant unfinished series (:cough Game of Thrones cough:), but one thing I appreciated about Chakraborty's take on palace intrigue and clash of the factions was that even though she clearly loved some of her secondary characters, she didn't get distracted by them. Like, I felt it was a good balance of "everyone has a story and these very interesting people have interesting stuff going on" and keeping focus on the POV trio whose story it actually was. I also thought she did a great job of interweaving all the different conflicts - there were a lot of moving parts in the backstory but it really all came together and tied off.
And, okay, I know they're not for everyone, but I love how she handled and resolved the love triangle. Which is not to say that I don't desperately want the post-series threesome fanfic fix-it that AO3 has inexplicably not given me yet (okay, it came out in June and is 750 pages, maybe it's not that inexplicable there isn't a lot of post-trilogy fic yet), but I think this was definitely a case where a bittersweet canon had more power than something without grief. (And also I'm not even sure how else it could have ended, plausibly ... I mean, I have thoughts about how I'd do it in fic, because of course I do, and if my life ever rearranges so that writing is an option again I might even try writing some of them up, but in canon, in character? Yeah, no.)
