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trying to figure out how to draw Eugenides from The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner

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I love how in The King of Attolia Eugenides and Irene's situation is basically the opposite of a fake marriage scenario.

Instead of two people pretending to be married & in love, it's two people who are married & in love but everyone around them thinks they were forced to marry each other and their love is "fake."

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Attolia broke an amphora once…

#his braid!!! #op this is incredible

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Mother why does the River not rise

It is not the River's time

-Thick as Thieves

Irene Attolia, the Queen's Thief, Megan Whalen Turner

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#so glad his meanest line is winning :)

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This:

always makes me think

#honestly by the end of the series it’s probably still a top 3 worst experience #weeks of solitary confinement??

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Happy valentines daaaaay <3

#!!!

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once again i'm thinking about that line in thick as thieves when kamet's like "it's so weird that costis would refer to me as a setran. the last time we talked about this i made a huge deal about how dumb it was that he thought i was mede. i just can't figure out what's going on with him"

#i'm joking and it's funny but actually i think this is heartbreaking #queen's thief #tqt

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i spent so much energy being disappointed that helen marries sophos that i sometimes forget about the really great parts of conspiracy of kings

#it's not anything against sophos he's my guy and i love him

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when i read Thick as Thieves, i didn't come away with the impression that Costis was having a great time for most of the book. he does seem to be more in his element than he was during The King of Attolia (not a high bar!), and clearly feels more at home when he's fighting and hiking and hunting vs. being a pawn in court intrigue where he has very little control over what's happening to him

BUT. while Kamet was definitely the more stressed of the two during their road trip for a variety of reasons, i think Costis was also pretty stressed out at times! he finds out early on that his charge cannot physically defend himself! he has to fight a lion! he gets captured by slavers! he almost dies of a fever! Costis does a pretty good job of staying calm for Kamet’s sake but no way he wasn’t internally freaking out at least a little when he had to give Kamet stitches, or during any number of other dangerous situations they find themselves in

i also think it's easy to overestimate how close Costis thinks he and Kamet are at the beginning of the story. he can DEFINITELY tell that Kamet thinks he's a complete dumbass at first (they literally talk about this), and i'm sure he can also tell that Kamet is wary of him and does not trust him initially! he and Kamet are definitely not on the same page about things for much of the book - we know that Costis feels betrayed when he learns that Kamet kept so much from him - but i'm also certain their relationship changed over time in Costis' mind too

#he handles many things better than kamet does but that doesn't mean he's having fun all the time #he also wouldn't be nearly as competent as he is in this book without being aware of how much danger they are in #<<agree totally with prev tags #i’m always a little puzzled by interpretations like the one you’re pushing back on in your last paragraph in particular #there is no way he thinks they’re friends until—at the earliest—sometime after the lion episode #and i think it takes much longer! #something something ‘actually i don’t know why you didn’t leave me in a hole in the ground’

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does anyone know of a fix for the way tumblr’s tag system now puts anything with the words “queen” or “thief” in the “queen’s thief” tag?

#i don’t want to blacklist percy jackson or iwtv but because of what some of those books are called #they bleed through an annoying amount #to be clear it’s not that anyone is mis-tagging it’s just all part of tumblr’s annoying de-evolution of the tags #queen's thief #tqt #<— maybe the solve is to use the tqt tag more

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"There are still--what, seven, eight of them?" I said, thinking that the Attolian had killed two Namreen, but that did not make him invincible. The Attolian reluctantly took his hand off his sword.

and

"What now then?" I suppose I thought he'd produce another lion's den for us to shelter in. He didn't. He loosened his sword and began to draw it out. "No," I said, pulling his hand away.

kamet spends a lot of time describing costis' strength (wrenching chains apart, hammering things, retinning pots), but i think it’s noteworthy that he doesn’t ever put it on costis to save them that way. costis isn’t a killer to him, he’s someone who produces crazy plans out of thin air

#queen's thief #and he somehow keeps this attitude even after costis kills a bunch of people in cold blood (and tries to kill him)

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i love the series but i was disappointed even as a kid by this aspect of the twist, and i think if i came to the series as an adult it would have been even harder to take—in other words, i basically agree with your criticism!

i do think that some of the later books engage in really interesting ways with power and violence but there is no getting around the fact that most of the main cast are royalty or royal-adjacent. (i assume you didn’t continue reading but it’s really interesting to think about how different the story would be if it had continued to center lower-class characters in the way the first book seemed to)

Looking back on the books I read this year, and was reminded of just how much Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief- absolutely frustrated and disappointed me. Spoilers ahead.

To some degree, this was going to happen; the whole series has been heavily hyped up to me, it's hard for any book to live up to such lavish yet vague praise. But, you know, I actually got through most of the book without being distracted by my own expectations. It was tense, and spare- it felt like every word mattered and hinted at an underlying truth. I love when books withhold from the reader, and nudge at you to consider what might be left unsaid. And I was so, so satisfied when my predictions paid off (totally called Gen palming the stone rather than losing it).

The worldbuilding was interesting and unique, I enjoyed that the author wasn't committed to a super specific and our-world-accurate timeframe for technology, and I found the characters compelling and variable. I always enjoy travel stories, nevermind stories about thieves.

Which is exactly why I was so annoyed by the ending.

Again: I love twists. I love being able to predict them, and I love being surprised. I did not feel like any of the twists in The Thief were unearned; it's a well-composed book, with plenty of foreshadowing.

However, one of the twists, despite being foreshadowed, absolutely blindsided me- because I would not have considered it as a possibility, due to undermining exactly what had me so excited to read The Thief in the first place. Fantasy literature sometimes shies away from politics, into pure escapism and fluff. Even some of my favorite fantasy books are pretty hollow when it comes to their fundamental beliefs, and shy away from challenging the status quo- unless it's to restore old glory (cough The Old Kingdom series).

But I can almost always count on stories about rogues, and thieves, and con artists, to at least bring up the issue of class. These characters so often come from disenfranchised backgrounds, from the poor and displaced. They're street rats and gutter scum, who have clawed their way up from the bottom, and never forget where they came from- can never forget, from the way others treat them. Theft is subversive; there's a reason we won't let go of Robin Hood, but even more self-motivated thieves often have something to say about the unfairness of wealth distribution. Stories about thieves almost always have something to say about the relationship between the wealthy and the poor.

So, yeah, I was really fucking annoyed at the reveal that Eugenides was actually the Queen's cousin. That pretending to be from a lower class background was so insufferable to him; that of course he's only so educated and knowledgeable because he's a noblemen, that it was so hard for him to pretend to be stupid and crass like a peasant. That the reason he was so pissed about being disrespected by his captors wasn't because they beat him and imprisoned him and insulted him constantly, that they treated him as less than human because he was poor and a criminal, a tool for their own use and disposal- but because he was one of them, and it injured his pride- his noble pride, not his human pride- to be treated like that. Like he wasn't one of them, and deserving of their respect.

Fuck, I hate it so much. It immediately took away my favorite parts of the book- the tension between Gen and the magus's companions, the weight of the magus having been a commoner once, the way Gen constantly stuck by himself and refused to just accept his shitty treatment- the way every monarch treated him as a means to an end. I thought there would be more tension in Gen having conflicted feelings of resentment and camraderie with the magus- I thought it would pay off with either some of them acting in his interest for once, and/or some of them rejecting their freindship and leaning back into that class difference between them.

I'm not opposed to Gen having been working for the mountain kingdom the whole time! But there are so many other ways to do that- I was suspecting that someone was holding his family hostage in some way. It's easy to imagine a story where Gen is a lower-class thief, who was also being used by his own country's royalty.

But, making Eugenides a nobleman is a subversion of the classic trope- which means it's clever and interesting. Uugh. It just exhausted me, and- disappointed me. I loved so much of this book, and it had been a while since I'd read a good low-fantasy story about thieves. It was suspenseful, with rich descriptions, and interesting character dynamics. I thought I was getting something like Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge, or The Goblin Wood by Hillary Bell- not necessarily stories about thieves, but stories about the underestimated and undervalued, peasant con artists and hedgewitches. But with more of the tension and bite of your average dnd rogue getting up to stupid shit (my go-to class since I was a kid).

I totally understand why people love this book. There is a lot I really admire within it. But man, I don't think I can get over how much that final twist- not just rejected my original interpretation of the story. That's fine, plenty of good science fiction or horror does that. But that it specifically rejects the character and story type of the lower class thief. The very name of the series, The Queen's Thief, had me expecting a story about that seeming contradiction; about the power imbalance, and a constant game of cunning, of maintaining autonomy despite being bound to a royal power. And I expect there will be some of that, in the later books; it just loses a lot of its appeal, when it turns out Gen himself is a nobleman, who was doing a favor for his cousin, the queen.

I liked that the book ended with more insight into the mountainous kingdom, and Gen's feeling of belonging and pride to a cultural group everyone else had been deriding- but that didn't have to be accomplished by him being related to the nobility of that country. None of this had to be accomplished through Gen being a nobleman; it just felt like a 'gotcha' subversion, taking away, rather than adding more.

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canon: costis and kamet spend a book changing each other’s worldview so irrevocably that each risks his life to lie for the other, they leave attolia to be together, spend another book largely off screen because costis prioritizes kamet’s safety over fighting for attolia, and eventually move in together and raise kids in some kind of blended family scenario

multiple fic authors: what if they actually didn’t enjoy hanging out together that much though

#we all go to fic for different things of course! #it’s just a little baffling

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love characters who are like "this is how the world works. this is how it has to be (because if i'm wrong i have to face what i've done // if i'm wrong i have to face whats been done to me) "

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Queen' Thief Phantom Thread AU

#starring gen and brinna

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shoutout to devotion so deep it borders on heresy/treason, has to be one of my favorite types of relationship

#yeah