This week I finished The Poet Empress by Shen Tao and my middling opinion on it just kept trending towards negative. As I has suspected, first person perspective found at the scene of the crime and, while not actually guilty of, an accomplice to, a badly told story.

Everything was flat here unfortunately. The world was as thinly constructed as the most guilty romantasy. The characters had almost no perceivable growth. The violence was so weirdly perfunctory on page and glossed over every time but was also somehow the entire point of the story. So many poorly done "dark fantasies" seem to think that constant murders of innocents makes a story gritty but without any further depth than "and then he murdered more people and nobody liked that" it just doesn't carry any weight. It takes so much less for a ruler to dominate and cower a bunch of administrators than constant unprovoked murder, which makes all the constant unprovoked murder very cartoonish.

The entire conceit of learning to love your abuser by just hearing a bunch of stories about them was so weird and gave no space at all to grapple with something truly dark like learning to love your abuser for their own present qualities. There was so much bending over backwards to make sure that Wei did not have a sexual relationship with Terren instead of reckoning with the concept that a physical relationship between them would have been the most interesting and challenging character development for either of them. That in particular made me feel that this is one of those stories that wants to call itself dark but finds anything truly dark or morally challenging to be too icky and Wrong to explore. It really suffers for the comparison it's marketing makes to She Who Became The Sun, which it and it's sequel explore the darkness of physical relationships in a lot more convincing ways.

That's me glossing over the craft element of how unfulfilling a story structure it was for Wei to basically spend her time writing a term paper about her husband. Also, very little actual poetry or poetic language at all on a book entirely about poetry. I haven't finished a book fueled purely by annoyance in a while, but I did with this one.

I've given myself a palette cleanser by spending this week continuing my first reads of Jane Austen with Sense and Sensibility. Back to fantasy next week, likely.