oanja

Welcome to the first chapter of the Goblin Emperor read-along! (I'm very excited about this!)

I’ve been wanting to do one of these for ages and I think my first instinct was to do it about the Wheel of Time, or Harry Potter. (I’m glad I didn’t start there, as those are such long and popular series that so many people have already said everything I would want to say, but a lot more eloquently .) I talked about doing this in a previous post and two people said they would be interested in doing a read-along of the Goblin Emperor so I picked it as my first book to cover.

Disclaimer: I have never studied literature, except for one course I did in University when I was doing my minor in English and we read a few English literature classics like the Great Gatsby and the Scarlet Letter… sooooo that’s my experience with lit crit :D I’ve read and really enjoyed other people’s read-alongs though so I kind of know what’s supposed to go into these. I guess we’ll see how this goes.

A few words about the Goblin Emperor: I read it in January 2015 according to my Goodreads page, so it’s been a while. As I mention in the audio, I can’t really remember a lot of the finer points about the plot, as far as I can recall it has a lot of court intrigues and plots and a lot of difficult to read character names that I kept getting confused about. These posts will have some spoilers for the book, but if there are major spoilers I will mention that at the beginning of the post on that chapter.

About the read-along: I would love for people to comment and read along with me, as book discussions are super interesting! I participated on the gywo book club this year when we were reading the Murderbot novella and I found it super interesting how differently people can view the same material. I am going to try to make both the audio version (where I read the chapter aloud and comment on stuff) as well as the written version. The written version will have a short summary of what happens in the chapter and then some commentary from me.

I am going to try to read this with the view of learning something about the craft of writing a book (as it’s a dream of mine) but like I mentioned I have no qualifications for academic analysis or anything fancy like that, so it might end up being just commentary about how much I adore Maia and how I want to protect him. :D

About the schedule: I'm going to try to make a few of these in advance so that I have a buffer (I'm in chapter three right now) and I'm thinking I will post a few chapters per week. I've had a lot of fun making these so far, so hopefully I can keep this up all the way through in an orderly fashion.

The audio version: If you want you can listen to me read the chapter and stumble over words and try to figure out how the language thing is supposed to work and what the rules are

Anyway finally onto the chapter itself:

Part One - The Crash of the Wisdom of Choharo

1 News Comes to Edonomee

In this chapter we meet:

- our protagonist Maia (which is a funny name, as it’s pronounced maja in Finnish, which means a shelter/hut, but the kind that kids build out of pillows if inside the house or out of branches in the forest)

- His cousin Setheris, who is an abusive drunk and Maia’s caretaker

- And a nameless messenger from the court (but I think he becomes an important character as we go on?)

Also mentioned:

- The emperor Varenechibel the Fourth (Maia’s dad) as well as some brothers, (but I don’t think I need to remember their names)

- Uleris Chavar (lord Chancelor of Maia’s dad)

I think I need to keep track of the characters as I have strong memories of being very confused about who is who as I was reading this for the first time.

I mentioned in the audio that I think this first chapter works really well as a hook for the reader. The inciting incident happens right on the first page as Maia is woken to receive a messenger from the court who informs Maia and Setheris that Maia’s dad, the Emperor, as well as all his other male heirs have died in an airship crash and that Maia is now the new emperor.

We find out that Maia has been sent away from court at some point and been sequestered in some remote part of the empire with Setheris, who was banished from the court for some unknown reason and seems to resent Maia as well as abuse him verbally (and maybe physically?). We find out that Maia is not purely Elvish, like the other characters are, and that all characters have expressive ears that show how they are feeling, but it is possible to control their position and movement. (it is possible that Maia has a tail?)

At the end of the chapter Setheris tells Maia that he has to travel asap to the Untheileneise Court in order to be crowned Emperor before the previous Lord Chancelor Uleris Chavar has a chance to scheme too much and prevent(?) Maia from claiming the throne. We find out that there will be a grand funeral for the dead royals and that Maia has a sister who was not on the crashed airship. We do not find out why she can’t become the empress if Maia is so undesirable as a heir.

Commentary: I think I already added some commentary on the summary… oops? but anyway. I really enjoyed the first chapter and the fact that it was short. That always makes the pages go by so fast and makes me want to keep reading. I don’t remember how this is addressed later in the book but I wonder about the airships, as those are a 1800’s technology on our planet and I don’t remember what other kind of technology we see in this book. It’s a cool thing to see, because a lot of fantasy is set much earlier in the technological development scale.

Then I wanted to comment briefly about Maia’s relationship with Setheris, as it is fucked up. I think Maia is really brave to go right to him for advice when he mentions multiple times how bad Setheris’ temper is especially when he’s drunk and Maia even makes a prayer hoping that Setheris hasn’t been drinking more before knocking on his door. I grew up with an alcoholic father and would not ever in any circumstance go talk to him voluntarily when he was drunk, so I don’t know how I feel about Maia doing so, but at the same time this might just be me projecting my own trauma on the book fictional character…

It was really refreshing to see a male protagonist be so visibly submissive and timid though, as that is almost never shown in books, or especially(?) in fantasy. I think at times when I was reading this book the first time I had a hard time remembering Maia is a male character as he is so kind and careful and empathetic. Which is pretty sad when you think about it and what it says about how men are written generally and what is considered masculine behavior. (but it might also be because Maia sounds a lot like Maija, which is a woman's name in Finnish)

Last note about the language in the book: I talk about this a lot in the audio, as there is a mixture of “old English” and “normal English” when the characters speak, as well as a formal first person pronoun “we” used. The language stuff is really interesting and I might write about it more, when it makes more sense to me. (I feel like the rules will make sense as I get further in the book, but in the first chapter I am a bit confused. In a good way though, as it’s another thing I want to figure out and find out more about.)

So that was the first chapter! Do you remember why you picked it up for the first time? I think I did because it got recced a lot in fandom circles and maybe it was a big Yuletide fandom in 2014??