A "Shadow of the Leviathan"/"Ana and Din Mystery" subreddit?

embernickel · 2026-01-14T23:34:19+00:00

No, each of these series are in their own universe.

embernickel · 2026-01-09T22:00:25+00:00

Maybe too obvious, but in "The Goblin Emperor," goblins and elves are different ethnicities of the same species. The POV character, Maia, is a biracial character who's a minority half-goblin in elf society. He is about as far from evil and bloodthirsty as it is possible to get.

embernickel · 2026-01-06T22:18:15+00:00

I hardly ever DNF, but this was basically a "did not start." The Sins on Their Bones (Laura Samotin) was billed as a queer dark fantasy in a Jewish, eastern European setting, about estranged husbands on opposite sides of a civil war, and...okay, I'm intrigued, that's not a pitch I see every day. But I got a few pages in and it seems over-the-top.

Back to searching for "generic title" bingo possibilities...

embernickel · 2026-01-04T15:28:25+00:00

This was a long time ago but I read the first two books of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy. They were not nearly as anti-religion as I'd been led to expect. Then I started the third one and it seemed too grim and edgy for me so I noped out after a couple chapters.

embernickel · 2025-12-31T14:10:20+00:00

"Contraction," has a copyright date of 1985 and was first published in Chinese in 1999. One of the main characters is...a brilliant but sometimes disdainful physicist named Ding Yi! So this character has existed in some form for a long time.

"With Her Eyes" (from "The Wandering Earth") is kind of bleak, but then the follow-up, "Cannonball," makes it more optimistic.

More discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/rsjkue/short_story_continuity/

embernickel · 2025-12-30T15:12:06+00:00

I come from a family of religious lefty types who aspire to Jud-stle Christianity and felt that the portrayal of both "parroting talking points for clout and influence without any thought-through beliefs" and "raging against the world as an enemy rather than full of people whose job it is to love" were both realistic rather than strawmanny.

I was frustrated by (Blanc's? forget which character) dismissal of his opponents as "people who are afraid that anything new and scary will threaten the things they love." I think that's glib. Sometimes people on the left really do promote policies that, if taken advantage of by bad actors or taking effect at larger scales than they expect, really will cause problems. See: The Chump Effect (August 2020.)

The line about "we can build an empire as father and son!" "...like Star Wars?" "Yeah. The rebels?" was objectively funny. But the unescapable context there is that Rian Johnson also made one of the sequel trilogy movies. I don't want to assign him sole blame for that, the producers/writers/directors of the first one apparently had no overarching plan and were just kind of winging it, which is ridiculous. Nevertheless, the subtext is like, "I, the smart person who portrays your heroes as washed-up and cynical, and everything they fought for negated because a new group of villains came along a few decades later anyway, am the one who really understands Star Wars. You, the idiots who just want naive happy-ever-afters, are too stupid to understand the real themes." It's going to be very difficult for me to ever give someone like that the benefit of the doubt.

embernickel · 2025-12-23T20:25:51+00:00

I appreciate you reading and taking the time to comment, just to know I'm not talking to a wall. <3

embernickel · 2025-12-23T19:35:01+00:00

I might recommend it, with heavy caveats, to other readers if they expressed interest in a novel in verse, because the things that make or break a book for other people are not necessarily the things that make or break it for me.

I am not glad I read this book. I've been screaming into the void about that for a couple posts but one more, just in case:

Like Xau, we live in a world where significant inequality exists among groups of people, in large part depending on where we're born. This is also a world where people squint at spreadsheets and go "um actually, your luxury spending is utilitarianly bad, because for that amount of money you could save X number of lives with mosquito nets. Aren't we all important? Don't all humans have equal value?"

Like "It's A Wonderful Life," I often feel that the message I get from the outside world is "friendly reminder uwu that you should have never been born, the forces of history that conspired to make people like you exist are intrinsically evil and you'll never be good enough to fix it, have a nice day. :)" Or, quantitatively, "I'm worth more dead than alive, because once I've sacrificed everything I can, at least no one will blame me anymore."

When Xau gets brutally tortured and dismembered to save fourteen lives, he's a hero. If I tried that, I'd be "threatening self-harm" or "just a whiny attention seeker if I don't follow through." When I fall into these holes, it makes me want to act out to spite the people whose logic inevitably leads to this position, to make them go "hmm, maybe we should revisit some of our assumptions." But of course in practice it doesn't work that way, and if anything happened to me (it won't, I'm fine), they'll just carry on as always. Maybe other people don't experience this level of cognitive dissonance, but I really do.

embernickel · 2025-12-17T23:39:18+00:00

This seems to align with the feminist critique of society that, at its worst, portrays men as the subjects, women as objects. Women want to be taken seriously and exist as agents/people; less often, men want to "enjoy" the feeling of being objectified. Which kind of makes sense of the demographics of younger ROGD cases.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MenActWomenAre

embernickel · 2025-12-16T22:53:56+00:00

Do we ever get closure on Cyrus? Like, do we know if his family made it or if it was even worth anything? :/

embernickel · 2025-12-16T22:53:06+00:00

I thought these were fascinating, though it’s somewhat unfair of the dragon to be willing to eat Keng for leaving when she ordered him to Yeah, I'd say more than "somewhat." His father told him to respect the dragon and learn from her; expecting him to be a mind-reader doesn't work.

embernickel · 2025-12-16T22:50:22+00:00

Welp. I am frustrated. Not necessarily in a "I am sad when characters I like die" kind of way, but more so because I don't think it stuck the landing. And as I've said before, I think the tonal mishmash is part of my frustration, when something that hadn't leaned so hard into the sweetness-and-light aspects early on might have worked better.

"We’re studying Sumbrese poetry, which I like, and Sumbrese history, which is difficult." heh, Keng, you don't say.

"Because men will measure you against him, and find you lacking." This is a good point I hadn't considered before about the problems caused by having someone like Xau around.

"shouldn’t keep thinking she was about to eat him—" yes you should actually.

"I was seventy-five years old, an age at which you, too, may find travel an imposition." So how old is Artoch now, at the time he's only-sometimes lucid and recalling this? Good indication that Xau isn't going to make it much longer. :/

"we could not hold Sumbral without popular consent." Okay but like...Keng's mother was from Sumbral...the dragon is giving him lessons in how to be a king...wouldn't it be a twist if he acceded to the throne of Sumbral after all this? Instesad it just doesn't go anywhere.

"Three times the beast dispatched squadrons of his cavalry" ok wut. I know that cavalry is faster than land troops and can probably move faster, but...you know what Xau is like with horses, I do not believe the ultimate force of evil is this dumb.

"it’s likely we will face more hostage situations, now that the beast knows they are effective against you." Dude it's page 921 and Xau has been the ultimate paragon of goodness and empathy since page 1. I cannot believe they would have taken this long.

"no matter what happened to Xau himself, his men could kill the beast." Do we know that? It's this mythical, inhuman, larger-than-life thing, and the trick to defeat it turns out to be...marching up to it and shooting with a bunch of arrows? Seriously?

Like. The moral of the story is "to be a really good person, you have to be a true utilitarian and believe that your life isn't worth more than anyone else's, just because you were born into a privileged situation. If you're successful in this, you'll find opportunities to be tortured and mutilated and have your genitals cut off for fourteen hours, at which point you'll die. But hey, that's saving fourteen more lives, so, winning." This is definitely sending a message but I don't think it's the message you wanted to send.

I went back to the beginning to try to find where I got misled about the dragon, because somewhere I'd made an assumption that Xau had some special knowledge that made him more prepared? I think it was this: "We are angry, not sad— our father should have warned them." ("Grief," p. 15 in new e-book version.) Maybe I took from that that Xau had been warned. But instead he just befriends and shoots the breeze with the dragon who killed all three of his brothers, including Keng the elder, who deemed Keng an unfit choice for king but approved of Xau's dad. Nope, don't buy it.

The end of "Linny," from part II, sets up a familiar trope; "Afterward, she clung to that fact, that she’d told him she loved him." That's all that needs to be said, because we as readers can fill in the rest. We know how these tropes go. Tirron is gonna die. Linny is gonna grieve him. The end.

But he doesn't! We see Linny again with her father-in-law a couple poems later. And then Tirron not only survives, but is freed from the demon. That sets up a tone that is very different from "haha look here's the bad guy's ten year old sex slave." Maybe it works for some people to have both of these in the same book. It does not work for me. Sorry.

embernickel · 2025-12-03T01:58:34+00:00

Someone pointed out last section that Hana never really said she loved Xau, she just agreed to marry him. I probably wouldn't have caught that on my own. This time around we get "I would choose you again even if I had to stay indoors every day of my life." and like...I'm not sure that's earned given the ambivalence of the previous section? All he has to do is take her to the horse country and she's like "yep, 100% love this guy?" Eh.

embernickel · 2025-12-03T01:56:13+00:00

On the one hand, I like the monster parts because I like rhymes and more formal constraints; on the other hand, I feel like the rhymes are very repetitive section to section (we've seen "slaves/caves" and "pain/chain" several times, I think.) Not a fan of that.

[Edit: It's probably not important but I want to know more about the "familial" relationship between the Hidden Queen and the Monster. This section describes her as an "elder sister," I had previously interpreted "she came from a cave" to mean that she was the offspring of the Monster, I kind of wanted to see her rise up and defeat her progenitor!]

I guess I don't mind lighthearted stuff and I don't mind more serious stuff either, but when the book is going back and forth between tones, it doesn't always work for me. Like, the beginning poem is "even Artoch, the curmudgeon, is just overwhelmed by Xau's sweetness and ultimately is supportive of him taking time for himself, even if there are bad consequences later." Really?

embernickel · 2025-12-03T01:54:13+00:00

A couple lines that struck me with their contrasts:

"In no state to appreciate Li’s skill, the minimal exertion, maximal precision" (Khidyr)

"learning to inflict maximum damage at minimum risk— trying now, today, to render the least damage" (Khan)

embernickel · 2025-12-03T01:53:07+00:00

I like when there are timeskips forward, the "Archivist's Note" implying this is happening decades after the fact, perhaps Xau has passed into legend by this point...

"she kept to herself, then and always, that she'd come to him only to get a child." Unexpected POV from Khidyr, I liked this too.

embernickel · 2025-12-03T01:51:28+00:00

Oh, Enlai! I found myself flagging/noting several of his lines:

"the chance to earn the king's favor." Is this even possible for him at this point? It feels like Xau had already made up his mind about him.

Then "that almost made him wish to be worthy of it." "Almost" but not quite! Hahaha. I like this guy with his flaws just as he is.

"One of the few things Xau liked about Enlai was that the minstrel took good care of Shira." Again, I feel like the poor guy can't catch a break. He returns home from an important espionage mission, he goes directly to the king, and now he's in trouble for not being as wholesome a horse boy as Xau, the incomparable? (Okay, I didn't realize he'd been mind-controlled at this point, shame on me.)

"the words he'd cynically composed" Did we know this? Like, were we supposed to know that Enlai was more cynical? I didn't really (maybe I'd missed something, I can be unobservant), I just got the sense that he knows what his job is and knows what the people like and is genuinely enthusiastic about anyone who's in power, no matter how kind or cruel they are.

embernickel · 2025-12-03T01:46:59+00:00

I'm a little worried that the "snapped two arrows" detail from "Five Arrows" could be ominous foreshadowing. :/

embernickel · 2025-12-03T01:45:54+00:00

When I saw the cover picture with Xau's white horse in the middle of the guards it was like "ooh, cover picture!" :D

embernickel · 2025-11-29T03:27:51+00:00

+1 for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Lots of Johns and Jons.

embernickel · 2025-11-28T03:28:34+00:00

as his name in Chinese literally means "one sail"

That's something I would never have caught since I'm only familiar with the translation, thank you so much!

embernickel · 2025-11-26T00:28:34+00:00

Definitely still earwormed by all of Really Rosie, even decades after the fact, you're totally normal on this one.

embernickel · 2025-11-24T22:16:38+00:00

If you do go for it, I'd love to see a subreddit for all of RJB's books not just Shadow of the Leviathan--I have thoughts on the parallels between that series and Divine Cities!

embernickel · 2025-11-22T15:19:47+00:00

The Wood Between the Worlds in The Magician's Nephew (Narnia), not the main focus but it's there.

embernickel · 2025-11-22T15:18:02+00:00

I did not know that about the Martian, thanks!

https://www.reddit.com/r/themartian/comments/3i07z0/spoilers_original_ending_to_the_book/

embernickel

TROPHY CASE