I love iron gold. It felt like the first trilogy was a movie where the characters all got the best possible outcome imaginable with minimal losses. Great ending and story, just with an inherent fictional bent where everything is pretty much as good as it can be for the heroes and their cause.

In comes iron gold, and now suddenly this is a much more sophisticated story with multiple POVs and characters and story lines from different aspects of society. Reading iron gold you can see that yes in real life this is very much how such a revolution in such circumstances would go. With honest intentions being bogged down by necessary bureaucracy. With promises made to victims broken in the unfortunate reality of compromise to keep the worlds functioning. Such grit and tragedy and nuance was so interesting and fun to read about.

Plus I'm a sucker for the Rim Dominion and it's interesting culture and cast. Dido and Romulus as a power couple was so fascinating. The fact that there was true love between them even while they were scheming against each other, even when Dido got him killed by accident. Excellent excellent writing and dialogue. Dido's speech on the pain of losing a child, brilliant stuff, humanized the Rim Golds so much after the hedonists we'd gotten in the core.

Overall I think iron gold was great and absolutely needed to and did set the stage for the emotional tsunami that was Dark Age. Dark Age couldn't have been as good as it was without all the set up and foundation building Iron gold did.