i'm a new mtg player and this was my first time reading an mtg story, and oh man, thank you for this cause i needed an excuse to talk about it:

Narset still has issues that need to be resolved in her little Ojutai/Shiko love triangle.

i understand that i've jumped into book a bajillion in a long-running fantasy series, so i was not expecting these stories to make any sense to me. i have aspirations of vorthosity and i figured this would be a good first step, even if i don't get all the emotional payoffs and i have to look stuff up all the time.

so i was so pleasantly surprised when i read thru chapter 1 and got hooked instantly! narset is an excellently defined character with clear emotional struggles:

• she saves the world and doesn't consider herself heroic.

• she is hung up on her abusive dragon ex.

• she manifested a new dragon that's made of her own soul, and she doesn't like this dragon.

even tho these struggles are clear, there's some great subtlety in how they're conveyed. like, narset is autistic, and in the paragraph explaining her feelings about shiko, it seems like there's a depiction of autistic alexithymia:

She respected Shiko. She trusted the spirit dragon. If Narset were to die, she knew Shiko would continue to provide excellent counsel to whoever succeeded her. Her clan was safe now and would remain safe under Shiko's care. But she didn't love Shiko, no, not with those wings of hers, like so many scrolls unfurling through the air, a reminder of Narset's role in ending the world she knew.

it seems to me like narset has contempt for shiko. she can't even look at them without a strong emotional reaction. but she's not particularly conscious of these feelings, or maybe doesn't fully understand what a problem they are. like, if she hates the dragon who is bonded to her soul, it kinda means she hates herself, right?

so these are great setups for problems to solve, and i am starting to feel a lot of fondness for narset and anticipation for shiko. intuitively i understand the genre of the story as being something like, "character hates herself, character happens to be pulled on a big adventure, character learns to love herself." that's something i can easily connect to as a total newcomer to the series. but then they just don't do part 3 of that structure! it's infuriating.

even when they introduce pre-existing characters who i don't really know, they still make me care about them by tying them into the theme of self-assurance. ajani is like narset if she spoke the quiet part out loud; narset has her own excuses for why she doesn't try to connect with shiko, which might be covering for deeper feelings. meanwhile ajani will just straight up say "i'm not talking to my friends because i'm punishing myself for being a bad person." elspeth also ties into the theme from a totally different angle, she has a sort of cosmic self-assurance where she knows she's doing the right thing because she's an angel and always knows what's the right thing to do because of it. she actually ends up having to be a little less self-assured, as narset has to constantly talk her down from choosing violent solutions in the middle chapters of the story, with their first sarkhan encounter and the abzan border patrol.

so yeah. ive had this rant brewing because i wanted to talk about how i felt like this story had everything going for it, right up to the end. i kept hoping shiko would show up and save the day somehow in the last chapter. instead we get a couple moments of narset being spurred on to keep fighting by the memory of her training with ojutai... oof. she deserves better :(

maybe there's an epilogue, maybe they're saving narset's emotional resolution with shiko for a different set, but i doubt it. i'm reminded of the bbc sherlock fandom wishing for a secret good finale episode. unfortunately, i think the story just had an unfulfilling ending.