silver

The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three sons in line for the throne are killed in an "accident," he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir.
Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment.
Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. All the while, he is alone, and trying to find even a single friend . . . and hoping for the possibility of romance, yet also vigilant against the unseen enemies that threaten him, lest he lose his throne–or his life.

Summary taken from GoodReads

The summary is pretty much bang on in terms of the novel's set up, but what it misses is the fact that Maia is upset, awkward, afraid, and uncomfortable for every single page except maybe two in the end. I have scrolled past discussions of TGE on meme for years and it's been on my reading list that long too. But I found it to be rather tedious, and one of the reasons is because characters like Maia don't appeal to me.

To TGE's credit, the novel starts at the beginning of the excitement, at the moment when a courier arrives at the remote estate exile Maia lives at, with the news that his father and all his older brothers have been killed in an airship explosion, and now he's the emperor. Maia's the youngest son and moreover the son of his elfin father's marriage to a goblin woman. His mother died when he was young, while they were both in exile, and he's been under the guardianship of his cousin Setheris, who dislikes Maia and loses his temper at him often. So he has had no teaching about the court at all.

I think that Maia's response to being emperor is quite realistic, generally speaking, though I have more specific objections about characterizations later. He's afraid to speak out, he doesn't want to be seen, he resents the loss of privacy, he feels awkward because he doesn't feel like he belongs and doesn't know how to handle the many complex personal interactions he will have to have as emperor. But as a reader, I found the whole novel dragged miserably. I can feel awkward and exhausted all on my own, thanks! It is not really interesting to explore it all in a massive fantasy tome format. Maia continually feels guilty, or sleepless, or flat-footed, or tired, or afraid, or determined to push past the awkwardness (unsuccessful) or any of the many unpleasant adjectives you can think of, and so spending all four hundred pages with this kind of attitude gets tedious.

I think there's a lot of people on meme who like woobies - and of course, except for venting, people generally want to talk about what they like, so the fans of course are loudest there. I just really don't like them. They don't appeal to me. I can see why they ship Maia with Csevet (his competent secretary/courier), Maia has to trust at least one person if he's not to completely collapse and it is Csevet.

Another issue - I found that a lot of the names were really similar. So many characters that started with C! Then there were many prefixes/titles that I didn't realize were titles, so I swam through the novel mostly vaguely confused about who they were speaking about. This does not improve my engagement with a book, because I like characters and tend to care about them, and it's hard to build up caring when you can't remember interacting with them before. And again, there's plenty of political camps, and I couldn't remember which collection of e's and z's were in which political camp.

Also, I think the final thing that bothered me, kind of like a tag that keeps chafing your neck and always reminding you of its small yet incredibly irritating presence, is the feeling that this novel is so...2010's. Almost as if it's tumblr-esque. Not overtly - I wouldn't say the prose imitates tumblr, for example. But the way Maia feels and reacts, it read so modern. It reminds me of those over-excited, poorly-researched GUYS LISTEN posts, where the poster then goes on to excitedly talk about how the Vikings were very feminist in this very specific vein of third wave feminism (without any awareness of any of this). The worldbuilding otherwise tries very hard to get out of Tolkien's shadow, and does try to use non-human signals to indicate mood, like ears flicking and such, which I did think was cool, but it makes an even stronger contrast.

I think this sense of modernity spilled into characterization, where it often felt like there were some characters bent into unnatural configurations to satisfy the plot. Maia's pretty believable, and some of the closer characters are. But others just seem to be warped towards one particular character shape. Idra is Maia's heir, his nephew. His mother hates Maia and schemes to get rid of him by going so far as kidnapping him - Maia thinks she'll exile him and then kill him, and I'm inclined to agree with his assessment. Idra is sixteen. His reaction to the attempted assassination is horror, which is understandable as he was not in on the plan. But later he has all these weird conversations with Maia where he's preternaturally understanding, and mild, and seems to have neither ego nor ambition nor sense of preservation in maneuvering. This is a sixteen-year-old growing up in a court full of political games and very close to the seat of power, with a very, very ambitious mother. But in order to clear out some space where not all characters are horrible, it's like Idra is - surprise! - quite nice. In, again, a really modern way. The society of TGE is pretty paternalistic in ways that resemble ours. There are a few female characters who are political barter (again, standard). But Maia is perfect of course, and draws them out, trying to figure out what they want. And one of them comes out and says (eventually) that they correspond with all these other female characters who are doing work like research on genetics (based on horses, a nod to Mendel's peas), or translating famous works of poetry. While I think these are all very interesting characters in other contexts, I found the way this was presented to be so reminiscent of the endless, lazy, and shallow depictions of Strong Women. I have come to loathe that term. And finally, I can just see the reams of dutiful fanart of those side characters sandwiched between 5870 posts with lovingly drawn art of Csevet/Maia. It's just so tumblr to me that it's hard to stay in the novel and stay engaged. 5/10