Genuinely shocked this isn't already on your confirmed books list, which means it clearly hasn't been recc'd?

Everything by Rick Riordan: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Kane Chronicles, The Heroes of Olympus, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, and The Trials of Apollo.

Seconding The Traitor Baru Cormorant!!!!

I feel the need to address some of the immensely negative reactions to Yeine and Nahadoth's actions in the final chapter of this book. I would have replied to that post except.....I actually only finished The Broken Kingdoms yesterday oops. So here we go.

First, to start with: my father was killed when I was nine, shot in an armed robbery of his workplace he pretty stupidly tried to prevent; the man who shot him was sentenced to life without parole. I can only hope that it's led me to have a deeper understanding of the nature of justice, and what justice means. It's not one-sided; justice is a social necessity that has to serve all parties affected by the crime as fairly as possible. You have to punish the perpetrator to allow the victim to heal; you have to prevent the same thing from happening again to more victims; and you have to take measures to rehabilitate the perpetrator, if at all possible. Subtract any one of those components and it's not justice. It's just abuse.

I say this to give context to my interpretation of the events in the book, so we come back to Yeine and Nahadoth and their decision to force Oree and Itempas apart. Intending to kill Oree just to hurt Itempas is not okay; and I won't say that forcing her to push him away is, either. But we have to take a step back and examine precisely what Itempas did to Nahadoth, to Sieh, to Enefa, and to the rest of the world.

Itempas murdered his sister, who was the mother of most of his children, and in doing so he instigated a war that nearly resulted in the total genocide of humanity.

He chained his brother, the god of changes who is very strongly implied to be not only genderfluid but identity-fluid, into a single, fixed shape, and he forced his brother's three remaining lieutenants into fixed shapes as well. He bound their wills and handed them to a family of mortals as tools to conquer the world. And those mortals almost immediately set to subjecting them to all manner of abuses: torture, mutilation, death, assault, rape. Every dehumanizing act humanity can possibly think of was done to them.

This went on for two thousand years.

They've only had ten to heal, and to gods ten years is the bat of an eyelash.

I cried like a baby during that last chapter. The forced separation of Oree and Itempas, whom I'd grown so fond of, ripped my heart out. But it had to happen.

Was Nahadoth's treatment of Oree unnecessarily cruel? Yes.

Was Yeine's intention to kill Oree okay in any way? No.

But was it fair or right of them to make Oree suffer by forcing her to give up Itempas? Well...to be honest, fairness or rightness doesn't factor into it. Maybe Itempas is a better person now, maybe he's healing from what he's done, but what about the people he hurt? How are they supposed to heal knowing he gets to have peace after the things he's done?

My comment has heavy trigger warnings for mentions of murder, death, rape, and abuse. As such, I'm going to drop it in this thread, so you can collapse it if you need to.

Ideally, though, true justice is a mixture of both: it gives satisfaction to the victims' pain and fury while also providing the guilty party with the necessary setting in which to learn and grow into a person who won't commit the same wrongs twice.

So while I understand being upset with Yeine and Naha, and I think what they did is unfair to Oree, Yeine is ultimately right: justice isn't served by giving Itempas an easy way out, because Nahadoth's (and Sieh's, and Zhakkarn's, and Enefa's, and all the billions who died in the crossfire of their battle) pain is still too raw.

Fun fact: Hiromu Arakawa mentioned in the third artbook that Roy and Riza would be married if the military didn't have anti-fraternization policies in place.

:)

:)

:)

s01e01- the pilot

or as i like to call it

"women in refrigerators"

Fullmetal Rock?

Nein

Full METAL Rock

This would be hilarious if it wasn't relying on the "sassy gay friend" stereotype for the joke

I feel weird about calling this a reclamation of agency when it boils down to a guy doing something for her. I mean, isn't the whole point of agency self reliance?

This is really unfair to people who make choices to let others help them because it's what they feel is best. Agency isn't some Ayn Rand objectivist philosophy. It's a principle of the ability to make your own choices about your being and the direction of your life.