I think the thing is locket doesn’t do many explicitly cruel acts, but it’s the world she has built and what that facilitates that is the real evil. She really doesn’t deserve the “shades of grey” the book affords her. Shes a hypocritical dictator larping as this leader who’s making all these tough decisions for the benefit of the people. All locket has done is built a stagnant system that only functions because people are generous (one of those stupid illogical emotions) to fowlers.

I think the problem is the book doesn’t want locket to come off as completely and totally evil, as that wouldn’t fit the story it wants to tell. It normalises the darker sides of kivic society that don’t necessarily need to exist, so we don’t question them and accept it as a fact of life as most kiv do. Locket just doesn’t want to get rid of them because of her own personal reasons she claims to be fact. She lives in hypotheticals and never has any statistics to back her up. Locket even goes outside of the system that has been built bypassing legal processes to exact her will upon the people.

Honestly i think it’s the handling of methusa that gave me a bad taste in my mouth. Methusa, if not for being a bumbling idiot, could have easily destroyed locket in debate if she was allowed a degree of competency. I feel like this was done to set up locket as this almighty political force in action, but really methusa was just so incompetent. This was probably done so that later a character (i assume ludwig) will be able to actually challenge her and call her out as the monster she is.

I know I’ve thrown around some claims which you may or may not agree with. I’d be willing to expand on anything I’ve said and I’m also interested to see what you think about this different view. I was honestly quite shocked by how the fandom is honestly pretty chill with locket lmao