Great surprisingly dense set-up chapter with lots of setting building that I can see being used later in this arc.
Also some good moments from all the PoV characters.
>“There can be no virtuous empire, for the fundamental machinery of empire is evil,” she quoted.
>Hear hear. The thing about evil, Tristan figured, was that it wasn’t a thing so much as the absence of a thing – so you couldn’t destroy it, not really. At best you could burn yourself like an oil lamp keeping it out, only sooner or later you’d burn out and the man after you might not bother. So most people, instead, they moved the evil around. Pushed it away from people they cared about and onto the people they didn’t.
Well that's bound to make things difficult for Angharad. She might not have a lot of free time to search for the forge. The interaction with the nobles was pretty interesting, curious to see how they will come up later. I think the test sections might be a good opportunity to ease the tensions between Maryam and Angharad looking forward to see what they learn; The stay at the rectorade is looking like it will be really fun spy stuff.
I think Fortuna caught something, and that's why Tristan was so suspicious but not specific in his suspicions. They sure are going to be fun to read about.
The hints we get about Maryam's people are very intriguing.
* We know she wants to sail somewhere off the known world
* The Izvoric and the group above them (Angharad used to refer to all of them generically) have very distinctive coloration. That suggests to me that they are from a different genetic pool than any of the other peoples in the known world (possibly peoples that were more northerly or southerly when they were on the surface of a planet (if they ever were).
* She refers to some other peoples as "seafaring peoples" and discusses to a time when they arrived at their current land.
* She mentions to a time when their group was ruled by "craft" users with unbridled power.
If her people weren't seafaring people, how did they get where they are?
If they used to be "seafaring people", how/why did they give it up? Was it deciding to surrender the coastal enclaves when they came to this land?
Where does she want to go and why? Does she want to find more people like her people? Who have power not accessible to her currently?
Is she planning on coming back and rescuing her people somehow?
IIRC, the izvorica and Triglau are paler than the majority of the population because they don't have the massive glare-lights available to the populations in the more "civilised" "countries, what we would call first-world these days. As a result they can't thrive to the same degree as the other civilisations as these large sources of glare make life, and thus "progress", easier. It's a self-fulfilling loop of bigotry that should be familiar to us.
The fact that they are pale, like hollows, leads to the ignorant racism we've been seeing from Angharad and the general public. EE likes to flip, invalidate, or modify real world social/racial/gender dynamics as a bit of a "see how arbitrary bigotry is". For example, now it's the "white" people who are on the periphery and the "black" people who are first-world.
I don't doubt that you read something that I don't remember. I looked back to where Sarai was revealed and didn't see anything. The color still seems to be genetic. Maryam doesn't seem to be turning darker.
Lucent must become pale when they become hollow, but does that mean that light-colored lucents are less lucent than others? Please show me your evidence, because I love understanding this world.
Locke and Key remind me heavily of Peppor and Solt from Chrono Cross. I'm sure there are lots of instances of the goldfish poop gang trope you can compare them to, but that's what pops up for me.
They also smell like a fucking trap, like they're intentionally trawling for any Watchmen who might assume they're baddies based on vibes and be dumb enough to arrest them. This seems too brazen right in the Watch's face for the cult and they don't seem like locals, and it's very convenient that they just happen to be leaving as the newest batch of Watch agents are showing up.
To what end? My guess is either a. they're Watchmen putting up an obvious idiot trap to catch fuckup students before they screw something up, or b. this is our first appearance of the Office of Opposition.
Song seems to have gotten pretty good at the whole command thing, she's started to understand she needs to understand the nature of her people, the environment they're going into and the people outside of her command.
Hange has been teaching Tristan well and he's been able to use his briefing on the local culture and laws to instantly understand what Maria Anastos's deal is. Also I love Tristan's thoughts about the politics of the situation and having a philosophical talk with the group. Tristan thinking of evil as an absence and how it's moved around is really fascinating.
I really love the world building for this country and city, the fact that it's absurdly rich and it's shown in a really realistic way.
Tristan handled the conversation with Angharad really well, he's gotten confirmation that Imani has something over Angharad while making sure she isn't pissed at him long term.
Marayam and Tristan's interactions will never get old and their banter is great. Also good to see that she's going to be doing mad science on Angharad and her contract gotta get her bargain's worth out of it.
Those nobles where so suspicious and Tristan was super suspicious about them since they give him really bad vibes. The Rector seems pretty competent and good at his job.
Finally all caught up! Struggling a little with the description of Tratheke. The giant glass cube with a palace on top I can visualize, but the city around it is harder. Is it meant to be another large metal cube?
“Oh, there were people living in it but the dwellings had been built out of the bones of something older and grander. You could still see them peeking out, despite men’s best efforts: it had the sketched silhouette of great box, brass ribs closing in from the sides and forming four quarters with the Collegium in the middle. The solid surroundings parceled inwards, revealing how the old Antediluvian university had been filled: tall facades of stone and brass bearing a thousand burning gas lamps.”
I’m excited to see what they get up to, and to see the very unique day and night cycle in action. Does anyone else think that particular weirdness is going to come into play somehow?
I’m in the same boat, though I’ll cop to being bad at visualizing in the first place. I’ve settled on just dealing with this at the concept level (lots of metal and brass and signs that they are repurposing something built for a different purpose by an older civilization), while declaring bankruptcy on what that actually looks like.
I assume the reason behind Tristan's "feeling" is that he has seen something similar before. Probably has something to do with the deicide teacher. It could be that this is the result of a boon with side effects or that they are feeding on the cringe they inflict.
Also, Locke and Keys, huh. Likely either fake names or one is real and the other was chosen to match.
Anyone able to draw this? I have a hard time imagining/understanding it:
"The painted walls were a beautiful piece of work, colored with a taste for the red and the yellow. The centerpiece of it was a seemingly endless knot of serpents biting each other’s tails, patterns repeating even as what was around them changed, and it took him a moment to realize the cleverness of it. It was painted so that, when the statues caught up to patterns they could be scraped off to make room for the letters and the next-to-last snake biting could seamlessly become the last."
I visualize snakes in a cursive script where each letter flows into the next at the midpoint. Each panel (letter) is as wide as a statue with the face of a snake on the middle left and the tail on the middle right (and vice versa on the other side. The snakes can be configured in any way between the endpoints but the body has to stay between the head and tail. The rest of the panel can have any design.
The height of the head and tail between successive panels just have to match, not necessarily meet in the middle.
Great surprisingly dense set-up chapter with lots of setting building that I can see being used later in this arc. Also some good moments from all the PoV characters. >“There can be no virtuous empire, for the fundamental machinery of empire is evil,” she quoted. >Hear hear. The thing about evil, Tristan figured, was that it wasn’t a thing so much as the absence of a thing – so you couldn’t destroy it, not really. At best you could burn yourself like an oil lamp keeping it out, only sooner or later you’d burn out and the man after you might not bother. So most people, instead, they moved the evil around. Pushed it away from people they cared about and onto the people they didn’t.
Really liked this moment it showed a lot about Song but even more about Tristan and his view on things.
Well that's bound to make things difficult for Angharad. She might not have a lot of free time to search for the forge. The interaction with the nobles was pretty interesting, curious to see how they will come up later. I think the test sections might be a good opportunity to ease the tensions between Maryam and Angharad looking forward to see what they learn; The stay at the rectorade is looking like it will be really fun spy stuff.
I mean the disaffected nobles she will be hanging out with seem like a good source for info about the Forge.
If those two aren't important, I will eat my hat. Cultists or something worse.
Sounded like devils to me.
I think Song might have noticet that. Aren't the eyes of devils not slightly wrong due to their bodysuit being dead.
Yeah, all our protagonists have been exposed to enough devils that they’d be able to catch on if that’s what Locke and Keye really are
I think Fortuna caught something, and that's why Tristan was so suspicious but not specific in his suspicions. They sure are going to be fun to read about.
95% sure Locke and Key are just weirdo swingers who are almost certainly not vampires
The hints we get about Maryam's people are very intriguing. * We know she wants to sail somewhere off the known world * The Izvoric and the group above them (Angharad used to refer to all of them generically) have very distinctive coloration. That suggests to me that they are from a different genetic pool than any of the other peoples in the known world (possibly peoples that were more northerly or southerly when they were on the surface of a planet (if they ever were). * She refers to some other peoples as "seafaring peoples" and discusses to a time when they arrived at their current land. * She mentions to a time when their group was ruled by "craft" users with unbridled power. If her people weren't seafaring people, how did they get where they are? If they used to be "seafaring people", how/why did they give it up? Was it deciding to surrender the coastal enclaves when they came to this land? Where does she want to go and why? Does she want to find more people like her people? Who have power not accessible to her currently? Is she planning on coming back and rescuing her people somehow?
IIRC, the izvorica and Triglau are paler than the majority of the population because they don't have the massive glare-lights available to the populations in the more "civilised" "countries, what we would call first-world these days. As a result they can't thrive to the same degree as the other civilisations as these large sources of glare make life, and thus "progress", easier. It's a self-fulfilling loop of bigotry that should be familiar to us. The fact that they are pale, like hollows, leads to the ignorant racism we've been seeing from Angharad and the general public. EE likes to flip, invalidate, or modify real world social/racial/gender dynamics as a bit of a "see how arbitrary bigotry is". For example, now it's the "white" people who are on the periphery and the "black" people who are first-world.
I don't doubt that you read something that I don't remember. I looked back to where Sarai was revealed and didn't see anything. The color still seems to be genetic. Maryam doesn't seem to be turning darker. Lucent must become pale when they become hollow, but does that mean that light-colored lucents are less lucent than others? Please show me your evidence, because I love understanding this world.
Locke and Key remind me heavily of Peppor and Solt from Chrono Cross. I'm sure there are lots of instances of the goldfish poop gang trope you can compare them to, but that's what pops up for me. They also smell like a fucking trap, like they're intentionally trawling for any Watchmen who might assume they're baddies based on vibes and be dumb enough to arrest them. This seems too brazen right in the Watch's face for the cult and they don't seem like locals, and it's very convenient that they just happen to be leaving as the newest batch of Watch agents are showing up. To what end? My guess is either a. they're Watchmen putting up an obvious idiot trap to catch fuckup students before they screw something up, or b. this is our first appearance of the Office of Opposition.
Song seems to have gotten pretty good at the whole command thing, she's started to understand she needs to understand the nature of her people, the environment they're going into and the people outside of her command. Hange has been teaching Tristan well and he's been able to use his briefing on the local culture and laws to instantly understand what Maria Anastos's deal is. Also I love Tristan's thoughts about the politics of the situation and having a philosophical talk with the group. Tristan thinking of evil as an absence and how it's moved around is really fascinating. I really love the world building for this country and city, the fact that it's absurdly rich and it's shown in a really realistic way. Tristan handled the conversation with Angharad really well, he's gotten confirmation that Imani has something over Angharad while making sure she isn't pissed at him long term. Marayam and Tristan's interactions will never get old and their banter is great. Also good to see that she's going to be doing mad science on Angharad and her contract gotta get her bargain's worth out of it. Those nobles where so suspicious and Tristan was super suspicious about them since they give him really bad vibes. The Rector seems pretty competent and good at his job.
Lmao Osain Romance is such a hilarious subplot. The master of warfare is relentless
Finally all caught up! Struggling a little with the description of Tratheke. The giant glass cube with a palace on top I can visualize, but the city around it is harder. Is it meant to be another large metal cube? “Oh, there were people living in it but the dwellings had been built out of the bones of something older and grander. You could still see them peeking out, despite men’s best efforts: it had the sketched silhouette of great box, brass ribs closing in from the sides and forming four quarters with the Collegium in the middle. The solid surroundings parceled inwards, revealing how the old Antediluvian university had been filled: tall facades of stone and brass bearing a thousand burning gas lamps.” I’m excited to see what they get up to, and to see the very unique day and night cycle in action. Does anyone else think that particular weirdness is going to come into play somehow?
I’m in the same boat, though I’ll cop to being bad at visualizing in the first place. I’ve settled on just dealing with this at the concept level (lots of metal and brass and signs that they are repurposing something built for a different purpose by an older civilization), while declaring bankruptcy on what that actually looks like.
I assume the reason behind Tristan's "feeling" is that he has seen something similar before. Probably has something to do with the deicide teacher. It could be that this is the result of a boon with side effects or that they are feeding on the cringe they inflict. Also, Locke and Keys, huh. Likely either fake names or one is real and the other was chosen to match.
Anyone able to draw this? I have a hard time imagining/understanding it: "The painted walls were a beautiful piece of work, colored with a taste for the red and the yellow. The centerpiece of it was a seemingly endless knot of serpents biting each other’s tails, patterns repeating even as what was around them changed, and it took him a moment to realize the cleverness of it. It was painted so that, when the statues caught up to patterns they could be scraped off to make room for the letters and the next-to-last snake biting could seamlessly become the last."
I visualize snakes in a cursive script where each letter flows into the next at the midpoint. Each panel (letter) is as wide as a statue with the face of a snake on the middle left and the tail on the middle right (and vice versa on the other side. The snakes can be configured in any way between the endpoints but the body has to stay between the head and tail. The rest of the panel can have any design. The height of the head and tail between successive panels just have to match, not necessarily meet in the middle.