The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison

I have read this book an astonishing number of times already, I know, but this time through I listened to it via audiobook for the first time! It's amazing how listening to an audiobook changes my experience of a book, even a book I'm already thoroughly familiar with.

When I'm reading a book to myself, I can slow down to savour the bits I like the best, and speed through the things I don't care about as much, and even fail to notice the things I don't really want to notice. With an audiobook, everything is at the same measured pace, everything is equally present to my attention. And if the audiobook reader is good, then the added reality of the characters' emotions and the weight of various scenes is even more present.

So! In some respects reading The Goblin Emperor via audiobook was like reading it again for the first time! (only with less stress, because I already knew what to expect!)

And honestly.....my biggest takeaway is that while I still love the book, it's not exactly a comfort-read anymore.

I've always focused a lot on the character of Maia, and his growth from scared and alone and traumatized to someone who is confident in his abilities and has lots of people who love him. And he is the main character so that's fair! And it's a wonderful arc! (although the two times Maia forces vulnerable confessions out of people under his power who don't want to share with him (Csevet and Celehar), without the narrative seeming to realize it's bad, is pretty uncomfortable too)

But uh. The world that the novel takes place in is alarmingly Bad, and although Maia gets a happy ending, and although the book is trying to say that the lives of the common people will improve through having Maia as their emperor........it's still really not great.

Let's go through some of the examples of terribleness in this world:

• Nemer, who has a high ranking position as one of the Emperor's personal dressers, is not able to afford a doctor on his own, and seems to have only been seen/treated by the palace doctors because he was specifically injured in service of saving the Emperor. Either medical treatment is horrifically expensive, or the palace pays its staff abysmally, or both. (And Maia doesn't seem to think anything much of this.)



• There are other species (beyond goblin vs elf, which is itself already notable for the amount of racism) which are dismissed offhand as nothing more than exotic goods -- the lion girls mentioned a couple times are particularly egregious. They don't even seem to be seen as people?



• This country extremely has the death penalty, and even a special kind of death penalty where the guilty party is expected to kill themself; and further, it's expected that all the Emperor's bodyguards will kill themselves if the Emperor dies, even if it's not their fault. And clemency cannot be granted for anyone charged with death penalty.



• Sexism is powerful and rampant, with the only acceptable path for women being marriage and motherhood, and any attempt to have a life outside that bars you from being seen as acceptable to become a wife or mother. Even Maia himself, held up by the narrative as a harbinger of change, clearly has to work himself up to allow a female magic-user as one of his bodyguards and only just barely accepts her. (And she's under a vow of chastity, which seems to be one of the things that helps make it possible to accept her at all!)



• Child labour, and child death from labour, is normalized. And there are no protections from dangerous working conditions for the working class at any age.

Maia does notice some of this, and even makes efforts towards mildly improving things, but like. He is one person, even if he's the Emperor, and it's clear that there is a lot the Emperor cannot do unilaterally. And he's really only mildly progressive tbh. Far better than those who came before? Absolutely! But at the end of the book, all the fundamental issues in elvish society still exist and still leave the vulnerable populations vulnerable.

And the thing is, it's also hard for me to just focus on Maia's happy ending because the book is attempting to directly engage with these questions. The Curneisei sabotagers who killed the previous emperor and all his other heirs were acting out of a hope for change, that having a half-goblin outsider as emperor would improve things for the common people.

But...the way the book frames the entire existence of a workers' movement seems awfully patronizing? Most of the Curneisei are happy to just dream of a time when things will be better, and the only Curneisei who are interested in taking actions to improve worker conditions......do so via murder. No space for the kinds of active agitating for workers' rights that our world has had!

Apparently the author thinks that top-down change is so obviously the only reasonable/effective form of change that even organized workers' movements can't conceive of anything else. Which is uncomfortable! (POWER TO THE PEOPLE.)

I've said before about other books that I'm fine with reading fantasies about royalty as long as the book isn't trying to interrogate what royalty means; I'm apparently too much of an anti-royalist to be happy with narratives that think about the issue and then come to the conclusion that royalty is Fine, Actually. And the conclusion of all the various political aspects to this book appears to be that a system centred on an inheritable, lifelong head of state position is great as long as that head of state is a decent person. Because the important thing for the well-being of all people is apparently to have One Great Man taking decisive action on their behalf!

To enjoy this book previously, I've been doing a lot of ignoring of that whole part of what the book is grappling with, in order to focus on Maia's personal journey, I think. And I don't think I can do that to the same extent anymore! Much as I still love Maia and all the people close to him. (and, tbh, a whole lot of other characters in this book.)

Dangit.