#the queen’s thief

[twowhoodles]

Resolutions can lead to guilt So instead, I remind you: Start as you mean to go on. Also: it’s never too late to start. Lastly: Make Bad Art.

Mole god original sketch by Megan Whalen Turner. “Make Bad Art” addition inspired by Oftheides on Geninsula. Embroidery by me.

#mole god #megan whalen turner #MWT #the queen’s thief #geninsula #make bad art #embroidery

[exercise-of-trust]

nobody else is doing it like them and the continent could not be more grateful for that

#eugenides #attolia irene #the queen’s thief #got the childhood bestie to read the thief and promptly got a 3am text yelling about our lying little viper #buddy you ain’t seen nothin’ wait ‘til he really gets going #excuse the sloppy background my laptop is suffering its 3rd catastrophic battery failure in five years and this was fingerpainted on an ipad #subcreation #stop whining : go to bed

[everywaythatmatters]

Attolia broke an amphora once…

#the queen’s thief #tqt #queen of attolia #my art #rereading this series means that I’m falling in love with every character all over again #oh gen… oh irene… #also wow it’s been a while since I’ve made any non-RotE art lmao

[thecrenellations]

Oh, you married the older sister (?) of the friend/crush you connected with on a dangerous adventure as a teenager? She has some gender stuff going on and was pretty much the only person who could get through to him when he was extremely ill after one of the most traumatic experiences of his life? On a scale of Jerott Blyth to Sounis Sophos, how well did it go?

#these four are VERY different people #WITH VERY DIFFERENT MARRIAGES #and yet #lymond #lymond chronicles #the queen’s thief #sophos #eddis helen #marthe #jerott blyth #something i #mwt #dangerous adventure is a weird way to describe a battle but I couldn’t think of anything better #lymond chronicles spoilers #hi qt fandom … sorry for potentially spoiling you for several lymond plot points when mwt reblogged this #amazing

[chimaerakitten]

I’ve been thinking today about off ramps in long running stories, especially book series.

By that I mean like, places where a person could stop reading and have a satisfying ending even if they’re not yet at the actual ending. (Someone tell me if there’s an established Tvtropes name for this I’m missing.)

Now, a lot of book series will have an off ramp at the end of book 1, because many first books are written without promise of a sequel. Like sure, there might be a sequel hook, but the actual second book is still up to publisher whims in most cases. So you can read All Systems Red or The Thief or A Madness of Angels and have a perfectly satisfying ambiguous-end sci-fi story or middle grade fantasy romp or inverted murder mystery revenge quest without ever picking up book 2. This is definitely an off ramp but it’s not necessarily the interesting or revealing kind because again. Whims of the publisher.

There’s also stories that have an off ramp after every installment. Leverage is famous for this—they had a philosophy of having every season be a satisfying ending, which says a lot both about the writers and about the story they were trying to tell.

But I think the most interesting ramps are the ones where by design or by circumstance, there’s a single off-ramp somewhere in the middle. One spot where unless someone tells you there’s more, you’d never be unsatisfied with leaving halfway through.

Sometimes these will be signaled in some way, where there’s a big timeskip after the off-ramp, or the series changes names or has a spin-off, or the POV changes, or after book 3 the author publishes a short story collection before hopping back in to novels, or the series suddenly jumps from being only novellas to a chunky 120k novel. (The Raksura books, Percy Jackson/HoE, Matthew Swift/Magicals Anonymous, and Murderbot all do one or more of these)

But sometimes off ramps aren’t visible in series order or marketing. Sometimes they’re organic to where a story happens to leave off at the end of an installment.

The queen’s thief has one of these after King Of Attolia. I know this was a satisfying ending because for seven years I thought it was the end. My local library didn’t have A Conspiracy of Kings, so I thought it was a trilogy. And you really can leave it there! KoA ends with Gen back in his element and recognized as king, the main internal threat to Irene neutralized, and peace on the peninsula. The Mede aren’t yet the immediate threat they are in the back half of the series, since up through KoA they’re mainly represented by the magus’s vague warnings and Nahuseresh, whom Irene thinks circles around. There’s no real reason to assume the Mede are a threat within the scope of the series. Now I absolutely prefer getting the whole story, but KoA is a damn solid off-ramp for anyone who feels like exiting there.

And that’s one kind of off ramp where the end you get is pretty similar in tone (mostly happy) to the one you get if you go on to the rest of the series. I’ve also read books where you can off ramp successfully right at the lowest point in the series and get a tragedy out of a series that ultimately ends happy, or leave at a high point and get a happier end than the main one, or exit at an ambiguous point and continue on with ambiguity. The Giver sequels make it pretty clear what happened to Jonas and Gabe at the end of the book. but you don’t have to read them or have that question answered if you want to.

I don’t have a really solid conclusion to draw here except that I think the positioning of off ramps says a lot about authors and stories, and choosing whether or not to take an off ramp says a lot about readers.

#I know multiple people who refuse to recognize the giver sequels #which has always been odd to me because I quite liked them and never thought Jonas died in the first place #meta #the queen’s thief #tqt #Murderbot #the kitten rambles #murderbot’s off ramp is after exit strategy if that wasn’t clear #Raksura’s is after siren depths #this post partially brought to you by #the realization that one can stop reading Temeraire at the end of book four #and get a tragedy where the horrors of empire cannot be stopped #and will crush anyone trying to change things

[sepulchritude]

The Mede ambassador to Kamet: “You’ve come from an audience with the king, but before that, from the prisons. Not how an honored guest is usually received. Perhaps because you are less an honored guest and more… stolen property.”

Not true! This is actually the traditional Attolian greeting extended to every truly important visitor, from the king of Sounis to the queen’s spymaster to the magus to the current king himself! Hope this helps

#frankly if you haven’t spent a night in the palace prisons can you really call yourself a friend of eugenides? #except helen #are they. you know. *mimes a manacle around my left wrist* a friend of eugenides?’ #the queen’s thief #thick as thieves #kamet kingnamer #sepulchritudinous

[siena-sevenwits]

Any storyteller at all: Do you want to hear a story about a guy who was never meant to be king, but ended up having to take the throne? And it was hard.

Me: Oooooooh?

The storyteller: And not just hard in itself - there was sinister plotting beneath the surface, and interpersonal stuff was complicated too.

Me: Oooooooooh!

#I just realized I’m a sucker for this setup all around. #the goblin emperor #the queen’s thief #king’s quest #and so many others

[haveyoureadthisseries-poll]

1. The Thief

2. The Queen of Attolia

3. The King of Attolia

4. A Conspiracy of Kings

5. Thick as Thieves

6. Return of the Thief

#tumblr polls #the queen’s thief #megan whalen turner

[moodyymole]

the thief, attolus

#been wanting to draw eugenides for a whileeeeeee #plus i adore attolia #eugenides #the queen’s thief #megan whalen turner #king of attolia #queen of attolia #fanart #booklr

[themightytrivia]

Scenes: moments in the life of attolia

#attolia irene #queen of attolia #the queen’s thief #megan whalen turner #i just really love her your honor

[cryptidlark]

Irene of Attolia

#started sketching a figure for reference but it quickly turned into her #anyway. read the queen’s thief #irene attolia #the queen’s thief #the queen of attolia #tqt #she’s everything to me <3 #my art tag

[goddessofgentlerain]

@onepieceof-stardust and I made this PowerPoint for trans club and I think the online masses should get to enjoy it too

#queen's thief #qt #queen’s thief #the queen’s thief

[doyouknowthisdisabledcharacter]

Do You Know This Disabled Character?

Eugenides is an amputee.

#poll #polls #disability #disabled characters #id in alt text #eugenides #the queen’s thief

[mothsartart]

tell me you won’t blind me

#qt #queens thief #megan whalen turner #eugenides #irenides #koa #mwt #the queen’s thief #fan art #my art

[lordgolden]

yeah ok. ya’ll got me

#the queen’s thief #I went to place a hold. but Libby had it right away #have to wait for the burning god :/ #finished the dragon republic last night. Wild book

[thatsadifferentstory]

i was watching a youtube video about the three main character deaths you can use in a story (physical, professional & psychological) and consequently the three main threats that can hang over a character’s head, and i realised one of the reasons eugenides’s arc is so interesting in the queen’s thief is that he suffers all three.

the physical aspect is fairly self-evident (*insert hand pun*). obviously, he never actually dies, but the threat is ever present and he does suffer quite a lot of physical harm which deeply affects the plot and his character arc.

this goes hand in hand (i swear i wasn’t actually trying to insert a hand pun) with the professional death, because the loss of his hand means, to him, that he can never steal anything again. he overcomes this, but it’s terribly hard, and he goes through a lot of development because of it. then he gets himself into a “disaster”: he becomes king. and he can’t be the thief anymore, not like he used to. he can’t be independent, he can’t do whatever he wants. even though he can still work in the shadows, he’s in the light and everyone is looking at him, and all those eyes expect things from him. the king of attolia is about him reconciling his identity as thief and his identity as king, about him stepping into his new role.

of course, he’s not just a thief, he’s the thief. in the last book, the figure of the thief acquires a darker meaning. it’s threatening, and terrifying, a slippery slope. gen is always at risk of tripping, of falling, of completely losing his humanity. he suffers a lot psychologically through the series, but i’d say this is the main psychological death looming over him. and he doesn’t die, because a lot of people love him, and a lot of people are ready to catch him. “saved him from what? saved him from becoming the thief, the murderous figure sitting alone with his dead.”

#the queen’s thief #megan whalen turner #eugenides #attolia #gen #irene #the king of attolia #the queen of attolia #return of the thief #spoilers #character analysis